Error: error configuring Terraform AWS Provider: failed to get shared config profile, default

Terraform Providers AWS
#1

Hey Team,

Good Day All!

We need your suggestion here recently we have upgraded terraform version to 1.17 and required provider as below.

required_providers {
aws = {
source = “hashicorp/aws”
version = “>= 4.8.0”
}
random = {
source = “hashicorp/random”
version = “>= 2.0”
}

We are getting strange error where provider is looking for the aws config file…and failing locally and as well CI/CD Pipeline.

Same configuration works with older version like.

Pin Terraform and provider versions as necessary for the root and child module

terraform {
required_version = “~> 1.1.7”

required_providers {
aws = {
source = “hashicorp/aws”
version = “~> 3.7”
}
random = “>= 2”
}
}

Please let us know what changes we need to do.

Regards,
Shibir G R
DevOps Engineer

#2

I believe there was an undocumented, breaking change in the AWS V4 Provider which results in a failure when it looks for a profile that doesn’t exist.

The V3 provider family didn’t fail: it would fall back in the same manner as AWS-CLI, and use the default (which works fine with configure-aws-credentials and other aws tools).

The easiest solution is to create a variable (bool, default false) which indicates whether the operation is being run in a pipeline. In your pipeline, set this variable to true. Then in your terraform provider config, dynamically set the profile using the pipeline variable as a flag.

provider = var.pipeline ? “” : $YourLocalProfileNameHere

This will allow you to continue to work locally using profile names, while the empty string will cause TF to grab the default profile (generated by configure-aws-credentials or some similar library).

#3

I confirm. Removing the profile line makes it work:

provider "aws" {
  profile    = "default" <- to remove
  access_key = "xxx"
  secret_key = "yyy"
  region     = "zzz"
}
3 Likes
#4

same here - having the profile line worked for me the first time I ran terraform init, but when I ran it again I had to remove the line

#5

Thank you! I was tearing my hair out on why my Terraform configuration worked fine locally but plan failed in (Jenkins) pipeline, especially since I don’t have access to the Jenkins instances, making debugging that much more difficult.