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Credentials management

There are two main ways to pass credentials to EfficientDynamoDb:

  1. Using native credential entities.
  2. Using credentials flow from the official .NET AWS SDK.

By default, EfficientDynamoDb uses its own credential entities. However, sometimes it's beneficial to use credentials flow from the official .NET AWS SDK. E.g., you have complex credentials retrieving patterns that are not supported by EfficientDynamoDb natively yet, or you prefer using battle-tested code for such critical pieces as credentials management.

Using native credential entities​

AwsCredentials requires passing access and secret keys directly in the constructor.

Important note: Never put your credentials as plain text in your code! Use some secure storage instead.

Example:

var accessKey = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("accessKeyVariable");
var secretKey = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("secretKeyVariable");

var credentials = new AwsCredentials(accessKey, secretKey);

If you want to use token authentication, you can pass it to the AwsCredentials constructor as well:

var accessKey = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("accessKeyVariable");
var secretKey = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("secretKeyVariable");
var token = "YourToken";

var credentials = new AwsCredentials(accessKey, secretKey, token);

Using credentials flow from the official .NET AWS SDK​

To integrate official Amazon.Runtime.AWSCredentials objects follow this simple steps:

  1. Install the EfficientDynamoDb.Credentials.AWSSDK nuget package
  2. Use extension method ToCredentialsProvider() to convert AWSCredentials into the IAwsCredentialsProvider which is accepted by DynamoDbContextConfig.

The following example shows how to convert EnvironmentVariablesAWSCredentials from the .NET AWS SDK to IAwsCredentialsProvider accepted by EfficientDynamoDb.

// AWS SDK credentials class
var awsSdkCredentials = new EnvironmentVariablesAWSCredentials(); 

// EfficientDynamoDb credentials
var effDdbCredentials = awsSdkCredentials.ToCredentialsProvider();

// EfficientDynamoDb context config
var config = new DynamoDbContextConfig(RegionEndpoint.USEast1, effDdbCredentials);

Automatic credentials resolution​

One of the common use-cases with the official SDK is to rely on authomatic credentials resolution:

var client = new AmazonDynamoDBClient();
var context = new DynamoDBContext(client);

This behavior is achievable using the FallbackCredentialsFactory from the official SDK and compatibility extension method:

var awsSdkCredentials = FallbackCredentialsFactory.GetCredentials();

// EfficientDynamoDb credentials
var effDdbCredentials = awsSdkCredentials.ToCredentialsProvider();

// EfficientDynamoDb context config
var config = new DynamoDbContextConfig(RegionEndpoint.USEast1, effDdbCredentials);