AWS Provider: support ~/.aws/config

[hashibot]

This issue was originally opened by @cjeanneret as hashicorp/terraform#7192. It was migrated here as part of the provider split. The original body of the issue is below.

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Hello,

Currently, aws provider supports the "profile" setting, allowing to pass directly a profile instead of the access keys. That works well.
Apparently, it directly goes in the ~/.aws/credentials file in order to take the matching authentication information. The file format is as follow:

[profile_name1]
aws_access_key_id= ....
aws_secret_access_key = ...
[profile_name2]
aws_access_key_id= ....
aws_secret_access_key = ...

So far, so good, it just works.

Now, there's a second file in ~/.aws directory: config.
This one has a small difference regarding its structure and information:

[profile profile_name1]
region = eu-west-1
[profile profile_name2]
region = us-west-1

As you might guess, credentials shouldn't be in that file, but there are other stuff, like the region.
Currently, when we use the AWS provider, we ask the user for the profile name in order to get the credentials, but we still have to fix the region on the tf file.

It would be great if Terraform could take advantage of the ~/.aws/config file as well in order to find the region and, maybe, other specificities we might put in there in order to auto-complet the provider configuration.

Apparently, there are a lot of possibilities, and that would also allow to set the "region" to non-required, like the profile and access keys.

Thank you!

Cheers,

C.

[eldridge]

It looks like there was a PR submitted for this back in February: hashicorp/terraform#11734

[loesak]

I just ran into this myself. Whats the status on this? seems like a fairly reasonable request.

[AlmogCohen]

+1

[bflad]

Hi folks 👋 This appears to be a duplicate of #687, so to consolidate discussions and efforts, I'm going to close this issue in preference of that one. Please 👍 upvote that issue and subscribe to it for further updates on this topic.

[ghost]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

If you feel this issue should be reopened, we encourage creating a new issue linking back to this one for added context. Thanks!