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AWS IAM Authentication Mechanism

Overview

The MONGODB-AWS authentication mechanism uses Amazon Web Services Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) credentials to authenticate a user to MongoDB. You can use this mechanism only when authenticating to MongoDB Atlas.

Tip

Configure Atlas for AWS IAM Authentication

To learn more about configuring MongoDB Atlas for AWS IAM authentication, see Set Up Authentication with AWS IAM in the Atlas documentation.

Specify MONGODB-AWS Authentication

The MONGODB-AWS authentication mechanism uses your Amazon Web Services Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) credentials to authenticate your user. If you do not already have the AWS signature library, use the following npm command to install it:

npm install aws4

To connect to a MongoDB instance with MONGODB-AWS authentication enabled, specify the MONGODB-AWS authentication mechanism.

The driver checks for your credentials in the following sources in order:

Custom credential provider (if provided to the MongoClient)
Environment variables
SSO credentials from the token cache
Web identity token credentials through the AWS_WEB_IDENTITY_TOKEN_FILE
Shared credentials and config .ini files
EC2 or ECS Instance Metadata Service. For more information, see IAM Roles for Tasks.

Important

The driver only reads the credentials from the first method that it detects in the order as given by the preceding list. For example, if you specify your AWS credentials in environment variables, the driver ignores any credentials that you specified in a web identity token file.

To authenticate to your MongoDB instance using AWS credentials stored in environment variables, set the following variables by using a shell:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<awsKeyId>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<awsSecretKey>
export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=<awsSessionToken>

Note

Omit the line containing AWS_SESSION_TOKEN if you don't need an AWS session token for that role.

AWS recommends using regional AWS STS endpoints instead of global endpoints to reduce latency, build-in redundancy, and increase session token validity. To set the AWS region, set AWS_REGION and AWS_STS_REGIONAL_ENDPOINTS as environment variables, as shown in the following example:

export AWS_STS_REGIONAL_ENDPOINTS=regional // Enables regional endpoints
export AWS_REGION=us-east-1 // Sets your AWS region

If both these environment variables aren't set, the default region is us-east-1. For a list of available AWS regions, see the Regional Endpoints section of the AWS Service Endpoints reference in the AWS documentation.

After you've set the preceding environment variables, specify the MONGODB-AWS authentication mechanism in your connection string as shown in the following example:

const { MongoClient } = require("mongodb");
// Remember to specify your AWS credentials in environment variables.
const clusterUrl = "<cluster_url>";
const authMechanism = "MONGODB-AWS";
let uri =
  `mongodb+srv://${clusterUrl}/?authSource=%24external&authMechanism=${authMechanism}`;
// Create a new MongoClient.
const client = new MongoClient(uri);
async function run() {
  try {
    // Establish and verify connection.
    await client.db("admin").command({ ping: 1 });
    console.log("Connected successfully to server.");
  } finally {
    // Ensure that the client closes when it finishes/errors.
    await client.close();
  }
}
run().catch(console.dir);

You can use the OpenID Connect (OIDC) token obtained from a web identity provider to authenticate to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or other services.

To authenticate with your OIDC token you must first install @aws-sdk/credential-providers. You can install this dependency using the following npm command:

npm install @aws-sdk/credential-providers

Next, create a file that contains your OIDC token. Then set the absolute path to this file in an environment variable by using a shell as shown in the following example:

export AWS_WEB_IDENTITY_TOKEN_FILE=<absolute path to file containing your OIDC token>

After you've set the preceding environment variable, specify the MONGODB-AWS authentication mechanism in your connection string as shown in the following example:

const { MongoClient } = require("mongodb");
// Remember to specify your AWS credentials in environment variables.
const clusterUrl = "<cluster_url>";
const authMechanism = "MONGODB-AWS";
let uri =
  `mongodb+srv://${clusterUrl}/?authSource=%24external&authMechanism=${authMechanism}`;
// Create a new MongoClient.
const client = new MongoClient(uri);
async function run() {
  try {
    // Establish and verify connection.
    await client.db("admin").command({ ping: 1 });
    console.log("Connected successfully to server.");
  } finally {
    // Ensure that the client closes when it finishes/errors.
    await client.close();
  }
}
run().catch(console.dir);

Specifying AWS Credentials

When you install the optional aws-sdk/credential-providers dependency, the driver retrieves credentials in a priority order defined by the AWS SDK. If you have a shared AWS credentials file or config file, the driver uses those credentials by default.

Tip

To learn more about how the aws-sdk/credential-providers dependency retrieves credentials, see the AWS SDK documentation.

To manually specify the AWS credentials to retrieve, you can set the AWS_CREDENTIAL_PROVIDER property to a defined credential provider from the AWS SDK. The following example passes a provider chain from the AWS SDK to the AWS authentication mechanism:

const { MongoClient } = require('mongodb');
const { fromNodeProviderChain } = require('@aws-sdk/credential-providers');
const client = new MongoClient('<cluster_url>?authMechanism=MONGODB-AWS', {
    authMechanismProperties: {
        AWS_CREDENTIAL_PROVIDER: fromNodeProviderChain()
    }
});

To use a custom provider, you can pass any asynchronous function that returns your credentials to the AWS_CREDENTIAL_PROVIDER authentication mechanism property. The following example shows how to pass a custom provider function that fetches credentials from environment variables to the AWS authentication mechanism:

const { MongoClient } = require('mongodb');
const client = new MongoClient('<cluster_url>?authMechanism=MONGODB-AWS', {
    authMechanismProperties: {
        AWS_CREDENTIAL_PROVIDER: async () => {
            return {
                accessKeyId: process.env.ACCESS_KEY_ID,
                secretAccessKey: process.env.SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
            }
        }
    }
});

API Documentation

To learn more about any of the methods or types discussed on this page, see the following API documentation:

MongoClient

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