Amazon Web Services Request Signatures

aws.signature is a simple R package to create request signatures for Amazon Web Services (AWS) APIs. It supports both the current Signature Version 4 and the legacy Signature Version 2. The former is used by most services. The high-level functions signature_v4_auth() and signature_v2_auth() translate request parameters into appropriate HTTP Authorization headers to pass to the APIs.

To use the package, you will need an AWS account and to enter your credentials into R. Your keypair can be generated on the IAM Management Console under the heading Access Keys. Note that you only have access to your secret key once. After it is generated, you need to save it in a secure location. New keypairs can be generated at any time if yours has been lost, stolen, or forgotten.

By default, all cloudyr packages for AWS services allow the use of credentials specified in a number of ways, beginning with:

1. User-supplied values passed directly to functions.

2. Environment variables, which can alternatively be set on the command line prior to starting R or via an Renviron.site or .Renviron file, which are used to set environment variables in R during startup (see ? Startup). Or they can be set within R:

   Sys.setenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" = "mykey",
              "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" = "mysecretkey",
              "AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" = "us-east-1",
              "AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" = "mytoken")

3. Profiles saved in a /.aws/credentials "dot file" in the current working directory. The `"default" profile is assumed if none is specified.

4. A centralized ~/.aws/credentials file, containing credentials for multiple accounts. The `"default" profile is assumed if none is specified.

5. If R is running an EC2 instance, the role profile credentials provided by aws.ec2metadata.

Profiles stored locally or in a centralized location (e.g., ~/.aws/credentials) can also be invoked via:

# use your 'default' account credentials
use_credentials()

# use an alternative credentials profile
use_credentials(profile = "bob")

Temporary session tokens are stored in environment variable AWS_SESSION_TOKEN (and will be stored there by the use_credentials() function). The aws.iam package provides an R interface to IAM roles and the generation of temporary session tokens via the security token service (STS).

Installation

To install the latest package version, it is recommended to install from the cloudyr drat repository:

# latest stable version
install.packages("aws.signature", repos = c(cloudyr = "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat", getOption("repos")))

Or, to pull a potentially unstable version directly from GitHub:

if (!require("ghit")) {
    install.packages("ghit")
}
ghit::install_github("cloudyr/aws.signature")

To install the latest version from CRAN, simply use install.packages("aws.signature").

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