Background

The AWS-provided tools for using Parameter Store (the web UI and awscli) are fine if you know exactly what you’re trying to find. They’re not so good if you’re… looking… for something, and want to explore your Parameter Store parameters like a filesystem, or hierarchical datastore. This is a dead-simple, quick, and rather ugly hack of a CLI built in Python and largely inspired by the Hashicorp Vault CLI, plus shell completion for parameter paths. This doesn’t write parameters or do other “fancy” things. It’s mainly intended for teams who are also using Parameter Store to replace human-centered secret stores (i.e. Vault, KeePass, random encrypted files, etc.) and often have only a vague idea of the exact parameter name they’re looking for.

Status

This is a somewhat-tipsy Friday evening quarantine project. There are (it’s almost painful to write this) no unit tests, and it’s largely cargo-culted from previous work of mine. I’ll gladly accept PRs assuming they look correct, meet PEP8/PyFlakes style, and are relatively straightforward and working. That’s about the end of “support”.

Requirements

This project requires Python 3.6 or later, as it makes use of both PEP484 type hints and PEP498 f-strings. It also requires boto3, argcomplete, and appdirs.

Installation

psread can be installed with pip install psread or python -mpip install psread

To set up autocompletion in your shell, either activate global completion for argcomplete, or for bash, set up completion for this project specifically. To do that in just your current shell:

eval "$(psread --bash-wrapper)"

To do that permanently (recommended):

echo -e "eval \"\$($(which psread) --bash-wrapper)\"" >> ~/.bashrc

Usage

There are two main functionalities: listing parameters and reading parameters. Shell tab completion is included, primarily for bash, via the argcomplete package.

$ psread -h
usage: psread [-h] [-v] [-w] [-V] [-R] [--called-from-wrapper] [{ls,list,read,get}] [PARAM]

Quick, simple AWS Parameter Store CLI for listing/reading params with tab completion

positional arguments:
  {ls,read,get}         Action to perform
  PARAM                 Parameter (or parameter path) to list or read

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         verbose output. specify twice for debug-level output.
  -w, --bash-wrapper    print bash wrapper function to STDOUT and exit
  -V, --version         Print version number and exit
  -R, --recache         re-cache parameters for this region of this account
  --called-from-wrapper
                        DO NOT USE

Debugging

In order to enable debug logging before normal command-line options and arguments are parsed, such as during tab completion: export PSREAD_LOG=DEBUG

Release Process

Completely manual right now:

1. Bump the version in psread.py and update the Changelog.

2. python setup.py sdist && python setup.py bdist_wheel

3. twine upload dist/*

4. git push

5. git tag -s -a X.Y.Z -m 'X.Y.Z released YYYY-mm-dd' && git tag -v X.Y.Z && git push origin X.Y.Z