awslocal vs aws

[mmg10]

The awscli-local is not compatible with the aws cli from AWS.
If I create a kinesis stream with

aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 kinesis create-stream \
    --stream-name ride_predictions \
    --shard-count 1

I can't view the streams using

awslocal kinesis list-streams

I can only view the streams using

aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 kinesis list-streams

And vice-versa.

Since in both cases it is using localstack, they should give the same result (which is not the case!)

[alexrashed]

Hi @mmg10.
In addition to changing the endpoint, awslocal also modifies the following environment variables:

• AWS_DEFAULT_REGION - is set to the value of DEFAULT_REGION, or the value of AWS_DEFAULT_REGION, or us-east-1.
• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - is set to test if it's not set
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - is set to test if it's not set
• AWS_DATA_PATH - is unset if it's set

In your case, I guess you are not defining the region as an env var, but as a config in ~/.aws/config.
Which in turn leads to using two different regions.
Defining the region in the awslocal call would most likely fix your issue.
Could you maybe verify that this fixes your issue?

Just if you're interested, this happens here:

awscli-local/bin/awslocal

Lines 98 to 123 in cca765a

	def prepare_environment():
	# prepare env vars
	env_dict = os.environ.copy()
	env_dict['PYTHONWARNINGS'] = os.environ.get(
	'PYTHONWARNINGS', 'ignore:Unverified HTTPS request')
	if os.environ.get('DEFAULT_REGION'):
	if os.environ.get('AWS_DEFAULT_REGION'):
	msg = 'Environment variable "AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" will be overwritten by "DEFAULT_REGION"'
	print('INFO: %s' % msg)
	env_dict['AWS_DEFAULT_REGION'] = os.environ.get(
	'DEFAULT_REGION')
	else:
	env_dict['AWS_DEFAULT_REGION'] = os.environ.get(
	'AWS_DEFAULT_REGION', 'us-east-1')
	env_dict['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'] = os.environ.get(
	'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'test')
	env_dict['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'] = os.environ.get(
	'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', 'test')
	env_dict.pop('AWS_DATA_PATH', None)
	# update environment variables in the current process
	os.environ.update(env_dict)
	return env_dict

[mmg10]

Hi @alexrashed

Thanks, your tip helped me. Both of the following two methods work

awslocal kinesis list-streams --region us-east-2

OR

export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-2
awslocal kinesis list-streams

So is there any advantage of using awslocal at all? Seems like I would be better off creating an alias to aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566.

[alexrashed]

As mentioned in the README, it is a viable alternative to just use an alias instead of using awslocal. As mentioned in the particular section this works for most use cases.
The issue you ran into is actually a feature. awslocal sets a unified set of default configurations (credentials, region) if it is not explicitly set. This simplifies the scripts built with awslocal and simplifies sharing those scripts (since the resulting resources will be the same for different users).