How to: Use multiple AWS accounts with the AWS-CLI

If you are working with multiple AWS accounts, you can easily switch between your accounts by creating multiple profiles on the CLI.

1. Get list of AWS profiles aws configure list-profiles. By default, there will be one default profile

2. To add a new profile, you will first need to generate an access_key_id and a secret_access_key.

3. Profiles are stored under the config and credentials files. You can configure additional profiles by adding entries to the files. In this case, we will add a new profile user1:
   

$ vim ~/.aws/config

[default]
region=us-west-2
output=json

[profile user1] // Include the prefix "profile" only when 
configuring a named profile in the config file
region=us-east-1
output=json

$ vim ~/.aws/credentials

[default]
aws_access_key_id=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
aws_secret_access_key=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

[user1] // Do not use the prefix "profile" 
aws_access_key_id=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
aws_secret_access_key=YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

1. Verify that the profile is successfully added by aws configure list-profiles. You should now see 2 profiles:

 default
 user1

1. To switch between different AWS accounts, set the AWS_profile environment variable at the command line via export AWS_PROFILE=profile_name. Setting the env variable changes the default profile until the end of your shell session or until you set the variable to a different value.

2. Use aws configure list to list your current profile.

For documentation to named profiles, see guide here.

Comments

[Glory Isaiah]

how can i make user 1 the default user

[Victor Adeleke Afolayan]

Life saver.
Short, direct and powerful article

[Janneke van Hulten]

For windows users, use:
set AWS_PROFILE=profile_name
instead

[mfadhili]

thanks a million