aws-whoami

Show what AWS account and identity you're using

⚠️ The aws-whoami CLI tool is now implemented in Go, and the Python version is unmaintained as a CLI tool. It can still be used as a library.

You should know about aws sts get-caller-identity, which sensibly returns the identity of the caller. But even with --output table, I find this a bit lacking. That ARN is a lot to visually parse, it doesn't tell you what region your credentials are configured for, and I am not very good at remembering AWS account numbers. aws-whoami makes it better.

$ aws-whoami
Account:         123456789012
                 my-account-alias
Region:          us-east-2
AssumedRole:     MY-ROLE
RoleSessionName: ben
UserId:          SOMEOPAQUEID:ben
Arn:             arn:aws:sts::123456789012:assumed-role/MY-ROLE/ben

Note: if you don't have permissions to iam:ListAccountAliases, your account alias won't appear. See below for disabling this check if getting a permission denied on this call raises flags in your organization.

Install

I recommend you install aws-whoami with pipx, which installs the tool in an isolated virtualenv while linking the script you need.

# with pipx
pipx install aws-whoami

# without pipx
python -m pip install --user aws-whoami

If you don't want to install it, the aws_whoami.py file can be used on its own, with only a dependency on botocore (which comes with boto3).

Options

aws-whoami uses boto3, so it'll pick up your credentials in the normal ways, including with the --profile parameter.

If you'd like the output as a JSON object, that's the --json flag. The output is the WhoamiInfo object (see below) as a JSON object.

To full disable account alias checking, set the environment variable AWS_WHOAMI_DISABLE_ACCOUNT_ALIAS to true. To selectively disable it, you can also set it to a comma-separated list of values that will be matched against the following:

• The beginning or end of the account number
• The principal Name or ARN
• The role session name

As a library

The library has a whoami() function, which optionally takes a Session (either boto3 or botocore), and returns a WhoamiInfo namedtuple.

The fields of WhoamiInfo are:

• Account
• AccountAliases (NOTE: this is a list)
• Arn
• Type
• Name
• RoleSessionName
• UserId
• Region
• SSOPermissionSet

Type, Name, and RoleSessionName (and SSOPermissionSet) are split from the ARN for convenience. RoleSessionName is None for IAM users.

SSOPermissionSet is set if the assumed role name conforms to the format AWSReservedSSO_{permission-set}_{random-tag}.

To disable the account alias check, pass disable_account_alias=True to whoami(). Note that the AccountAliases field will then be an empty list, not None.

format_whoami() takes a WhoamiInfo object and returns the formatted string used for display.