awssh ☁️🔒🐚

This project provides a tool that simplifies secure shell connections over AWS Systems Manager (formerly known as SSM).

Pre-requisites

• The AWS CLI installed on your system.
• The Session Manager plugin for the AWS CLI installed on your system.
• A valid AWS profile that has permissions to start/stop SSM sessions.
• A bash shell.

Usage

Setup

1. Install the awssh command line utility. One easy way to do this is to run the setup-env script in the main directory.

2. Define environment variables:

   • AWSSH_PROFILE_FILTER: A string that will match one or more profiles in your AWS configuration file that have permission to start/stop SSM sessions.
   • AWSSH_USER: The username to use for ssh connections over SSM.

   export AWSSH_PROFILE_FILTER="startstopssmsession"
   export AWSSH_USER="lemmy.kilmister"

3. Source the awssh-completion.bash file in your bash environment:

   source tools/awssh-completion.bash

   If you skip this step, you won't get to enjoy any of that sweet, sweet tab completion that will make life a lot easier for you. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Nix

If you have Nix installed you can use the flake.nix configuration file located at the root of the project to build and run awssh:

nix build

After the build has completed, the awssh executable can be found at: result/bin/awssh

To run the program simply execute the binary from the project root:

result/bin/awssh --help

Start a SSM shell session without ssh

awssh --no-ssh my-aws-startstopssmsession-profile i-01234567890abcdef

Start a SSM shell session with ssh

awssh my-aws-startstopssmsession-profile i-01234567890abcdef

Tab completion can be used to autocomplete the following items as you type your awssh command:

• Shared credentials file (following -c, --credentials=FILENAME), by showing matching files in the .aws directory in your home directory (e.g. ~/.aws/)
• AWS region (-r, --region)
• AWS profile (<profile>), provided your chosen (or default) credentials file contains at least one profile that matches the string specified by the AWSSH_PROFILE_FILTER environment variable
• AWS instance you want to open a session to (<instance-id>); note that if your instance is tagged with a name, you can start typing that name and when you tab complete, the name will be transformed into the instance ID (assuming you have typed enough of the name to identify a unique instance).

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Special development pre-requisites

Note

This project supports installation via a Nix flake.nix file, and as a result the bump_version.sh script requires that Nix be installed locally.

License

This project is in the worldwide public domain.

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.