paws auth

We use the packagepaws tointeract with AWS.paws also handles the authentication.paws looks for credentials in a few different places, inthe following order:

1. “Settings” (aka: function inputs) provided to individual AWSservicespawsservice settings
2. Environment variablespawssupported env vars

• You can set the three most important environment variables within Rfor the current R session like:Sys.setenv(AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "", AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "", AWS_REGION = "us-west-2").Or set them in a variety of ways to be available across R sessions. Seethe [R Startup chapter][r-startup] ofWhat They Forgot to Teach YouAbout R book for more details.

3. AWSsharedcredentials file andAWSconfig file

• The default location for the AWS shared credentials file is~/.aws/credentials. Look there to see if you have thisset.
• The default location for the AWS config file is~/.aws/config

4. An EC2 instance or IAM role

sixtyfour intializes R6 classes that are the objectbehind apaws service (e.g., for S3), and during theinitialization it attempts to gather credentials following the aboveorder.

sixtyfour does not provide any mechanism directly in thepackage to modify what credentials are used. However, following thepaws docs linked above you can modify what credentials areused by adjusting what credentials you have set.

Some users may have more than one set of credentials - the nextsection digs into how to approach making suresixtyfour isusing the credentials you want to be using.

Note that the first option above - passing credentials directly asfunction parameters - we do not use insixtyfour so thatwe’re not encouraging secrets being directly put into code where thosesecrets may show up in public.

For many different auth scenarios see thepawscredentials docs.

Setting credentials

It probably makes the most sense to manage your AWS credentials usingonly one of the above methods. However, you may need to use acombination depending on your needs.

There are various ways to set credentials. Most often - as thepaws docsspell out - you will tellpaws what creds to use viaenvironment variables. You can do that in various ways:

• You can already have env vars exported globally on your system, andthen R will pick those up
• Start R with an env var set just for that R session, for example:AWS_REGION=us-east-1 R, then when you loadpaws it will use that env var
• You can set env vars within an R session, either globally for thesession or perhaps with for exmaplewithr::with_envvar,setting a certain set of AWS creds for just the duration of the callblock passed in towith_envvar.