IAM Credentials
SST uses your AWS credentials to run the Live Lambda Development environment and deploy your app. Let's take a look at how to load these credentials, creating an IAM policy for SST, and the basic set of permissions that all CDK apps need.
Loading credentials
There are a few different ways to set the credentials that SST will use. Starting with the simplest.
Loading from a file
You can keep you AWS credentials in a file. The credentials are found at:
~/.aws/credentials
on Linux, Unix, and macOS;C:\Users\USER_NAME\.aws\credentials
on Windows
If the credentials file does not exist on your machine:
The credentials file should look like:
[default]
aws_access_key_id = <YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
aws_secret_access_key = <YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
And if you have multiple credentials configured, it might look like:
[default]
aws_access_key_id = <DEFAULT_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
aws_secret_access_key = <DEFAULT_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
[staging]
aws_access_key_id = <STAGING_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
aws_secret_access_key = <STAGING_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
[production]
aws_access_key_id = <PRODUCTION_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
aws_secret_access_key = <PRODUCTION_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
By default, SST uses the credentials for the [default]
profile. To use one of the other profiles, set the AWS_PROFILE
environment variable. For example:
$ AWS_PROFILE=staging npx sst deploy
Loading from environment variables
SST automatically detects AWS credentials in your environment and uses them for making requests to AWS. The environment variables that you need to set are:
- AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
- AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
This is often the most convenient way to configure credentials when deploying your SST app in a CI environment. If you are deploying through Seed, follow this guide to configure IAM credentials.
Configuring AWS Vault
If you are using AWS Vault to store your IAM credentials locally, it needs to be MFA authenticated. Add the mfa_serial
property in your AWS config file. This will cause AWS Vault to prompt for the MFA token.
Configuring Leapp
If you are using Leapp to store your IAM credentials in your local environment, the IAM credentials need to be MFA authenticated.
Configure the MFA Device ARN
when adding the credentials.
Then Leapp will prompt for the MFA token when enabling the session.
Creating an IAM policy
There are 4 strategies you can use to decide what IAM permissions you want to grant SST. The decision is primarily based on your use case and your team's security requirement.
1. Grant AdministratorAccess
permission
Use this strategy if you are deploying to a development AWS account, and you want to try out SST quickly.
2. Grant full permission to selected AWS services
You can grant permissions to the AWS services you are using. This strategy prevents you from creating, updating, or removing AWS resources outside the scope of your app.
For example, to create a CRUD API endpoint that uses DynamoDB, the following permissions are required:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Sid": "ManageCloudFormationStacks",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["cloudformation:*"],
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Sid": "ManageApi",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["iam:*", "logs:*", "lambda:*", "dynamodb:*", "apigateway:*"],
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}
If you decide to enable custom domains for the API endpoint, a couple more permissions are required:
{
"Sid": "ManageCustomDomain",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["acm:*", "route53:*", "cloudfront:*"],
"Resource": "*"
}
3. Generate using IAM Access Analyzer
The general idea of this strategy is to grant a broad permissions policy for the IAM user or role at first. Use it to deploy the SST app for some time. Then let IAM Access Analyzer analyze your CloudTrail events to identify actions and services that have been used by the IAM user or role. The analyzer will generate an IAM policy that is based on that activity. You can then replace the policy with the generated one.
You can read more about the steps required here - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access-analyzer-policy-generation.html
4. Use CloudFormation service role
By default, CloudFormation uses a set of temporary IAM credentials generated from your IAM credentials to deploy your stacks. So your IAM credentials need to have all the required permissions that CloudFormation in turn needs.
Instead, you can create an IAM role to explicitly specify the actions that CloudFormation can perform, which might not always be the same actions that you or other users can do.
For example, you might have full AdministratorAccess
permission, but you can limit CloudFormation access to only a subset of privileges.
Alternatively, you might not want everyone on the team to have the permissions to create Lambda functions directly in the AWS console or via AWS CLI, but they can trigger a deployment, and let CloudFormation create Lambda functions as part of the SST app.
Use the --role
option to configure the CloudFormation service role that SST will use. Read more about this option here.
Bootstrap permissions
In addition to the permissions required to deploy your SST app, you also need permissions to deploy the resources in the CDK Bootstrap stack.
The CDK Bootstrap stack needs to be deployed once per AWS account, per region. It will be automatically deployed the first time you run sst deploy
or sst dev
. The stack contains the following AWS resources:
- AWS::IAM::Role
- AWS::IAM::Policy
- AWS::KMS::Key
- AWS::KMS::Alias
- AWS::S3::Bucket
- AWS::ECR::Repository
You can read more about CDK Bootstrap here. And you can find the latest stack template here.
CLI permissions
The SST CLI command also makes AWS SDK calls to your AWS account. Here is a list of IAM permissions required by the CLI:
- cloudformation:DeleteStack
- cloudformation:DescribeStackEvents
- cloudformation:DescribeStackResources
- cloudformation:DescribeStacks
- cloudformation:GetTemplate
- cloudformation:ListImports
- iam:PassRole
- iot:Connect
- iot:DescribeEndpoint
- iot:Publish
- iot:Receive
- iot:Subscribe
- lambda:GetFunctionConfiguration
- lambda:UpdateFunctionConfiguration
- s3:GetObject
- s3:PutObject
- s3:DeleteObject
- s3:ListObjectsV2
- ssm:PutParameter
- ssm:GetParameter
- ssm:DeleteParameter
- ssm:GetParametersByPath
- sts:AssumeRole
And if you are using the RDS
construct, you will also need:
- rds-data:ExecuteStatement