How to implement export values in terraform - amazon-web-services

Question

I tried to create a simple example in AWS environments. In the beginning, I export 2 values:
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID= something
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY= something
After that, I wrote a simple code.
provider "aws" {
region = "us-east-1"
access_key = AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
secret_key = AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
}
resource "aws_instance" "example" {
ami = "ami-40d28157"
instance_type = "t2.micro"
tags = {
Name = "terraform-example"
}
}
When I define values instead of parameters AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY everything works OK, but with the provided code, I see the following error
on main.tf line 4, in provider "aws":
4: secret_key = AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
A reference to a resource type must be followed by at least one attribute
access, specifying the resource name.
Some ideas on how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You don't have to do anything. As explained in the terraform authentication documentation for AWS provider, terraform will automatically use the credentials in that order:
Static credentials
Environment variables
Shared credentials/configuration file
CodeBuild, ECS, and EKS Roles
EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDS and IMDSv2)
So once you export your keys (make sure to export them correctly):
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="something"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="something"
in your config file you would just use (exemplified in the docs):
provider "aws" {
region = "us-east-1"
}
resource "aws_instance" "example" {
ami = "ami-40d28157"
instance_type = "t2.micro"
tags = {
Name = "terraform-example"
}
}