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Auto-refresh AWS Tokens Using IAM Role and boto3

Chastina Li 👩🏻‍💻 on October 18, 2018

The Curse of The Hour Session management in AWS is complicated, especially when authenticating with IAM roles. A common way to obtain AW...

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Noelle Leigh • Jul 21 '22

For future visitors: RefreshableCredentials isn't documented, but can be found in the source code.

Kostiantyn Noha • Dec 10 '21 • Edited

@li_chastina Thanks fir the snippets!
But one question: in order to refresh credentials do we need to call autorefresh_session.client each time we use a client functions or its enough to always use db_client reference and credentials refreshed automatically?

jinyeng • Jul 24 '23

When I use this sample and print session info, looks like its generating a new credentials on every resource request !

Mandheer • Sep 3 '19

This post made my day.

Mads Hvelplund • Sep 19 '25

Great article. I got it working for my special case with a little work. For others coming here later, take a look at "DeferredRefreshableCredentials" which is sub-class of "RefreshableCredentials" that signs in lazily.

cmartín • Aug 7 '19

This really worked for me. You helped me a lot. Thank you Chastina!
I will post again if i find something interesting about this botocore class.

jinyeng • Jul 24 '23

Thanks For this great article. I am trying to use this code for S3 bucket listing and upload. I have two issues. I see that when I try to list bucket, it seems to again refresh credentials every time.

Also when trying to list bucket contents, it just gets stuck foerver without a response.