Mount AWS Credentials on VSCode Devcontainers

I’ve written in past about my preference of using VSCode’s devcontainers for developing Python applications.

While I work extensively with Python & AWS, one of the problems I’ve faced is that everytime I create a new devcontainer or rebuild one, I need to enter my AWS credentials again.

So I set about fixing this problem. I explored the idea of creating environmental variables and loading them directly into the container. I thought about copying the credentials file itself onto the container during build. But of of them weren’t clean ideas and had their own problems.

Turns out all it requires is a simple statement on devcontainer.json file.

How to mount AWS credentials on VSCode Devcontainers

Edit the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file, add the following line after build instructions:

	"mounts": [
		"source=${localEnv:HOME}/.aws,target=/home/vscode/.aws,type=bind,consistency=cached"
	],

This will only work if you’re using WSL2-backed devcontainers.

If you are using pure Windows based devcontainers, the above instructions may not work as I discovered after following this guide.