AWS SDK for PHP: Error retrieving credentials from the instance profile metadata server

Question

I am trying to send SNS messeges to android through web api. Downloaded and installed the SDK from http://aws.amazon.com/developers/getting-started/php/

Got following error while running sample.php:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Aws\Common\Exception\InstanceProfileCredentialsException' with message 'Error retrieving credentials from the instance profile metadata server. When you are not running inside of Amazon EC2, you must provide your AWS access key ID and secret access key in the "key" and "secret" options when creating a client or provide an instantiated Aws\Common\Credentials\CredentialsInterface object. ([curl] 28: Connection timed out after 5016 milliseconds [url] http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/)' in C:\xampp\htdocs\aws-php\vendor\aws\aws-sdk-php\src\Aws\Common\InstanceMetadata\InstanceMetadataClient.php:85 Stack trace: #0 C:\xampp\htdocs\aws-php\vendor\aws\aws-sdk-php\src\Aws\Common\Credentials\RefreshableInstanceProfileCredentials.php(52): Aws\Common\InstanceMetadata\InstanceMetadataClient->getInstanceProfileCredentials() #1 C:\xampp\htdocs\aws-php\vendor\aws\aws-sdk-php\src\Aws\Common\Credentials\AbstractRefreshableCredentials.php(54): Aws\Common\Credentials\Refreshable in C:\xampp\htdocs\aws-php\vendor\aws\aws-sdk-php\src\Aws\Common\InstanceMetadata\InstanceMetadataClient.php on line 85

A little guidance on this topic will help me a lot

Answer 1

In my case, I was using

return DynamoDbClient::factory(array(
  'version' => 'latest',
  'region'  => AWS_REGION,
  'key' => AWS_KEY,
  'secret'  => AWS_SECRET
));

which used to be ok with aws/aws-sdk-php version 2.8.5 , but when composer automatically installed version 3.2.0, I got the error above. The problem is simply that I should've changed the way I made the call to

return DynamoDbClient::factory(array(
  'version' => 'latest',
  'region'  => AWS_REGION,
  'credentials' => array(
    'key' => AWS_KEY,
    'secret'  => AWS_SECRET,
  )
));

as documented here. Without changing the call, the apache php was falling back to looking for the ~/.aws/credentials file using the HOME environment variable, which was empty. You can check its value by running php -r 'var_dump(getenv("HOME"));'.

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