Install aws-iam-authenticator with Homebrew, chocolatey, MacPorts, Nix, scoop, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• aws-iam-authenticator

Project history

The repository README says the initial work was driven by Heptio and that the project receives community contributions while being maintained by Heptio and Amazon EKS OSS Engineers. The tool arose from the need to avoid a separate Kubernetes credential system for clusters whose administrators already manage AWS IAM credentials.

AWS's Open Source Blog described the 2018 community project as initially driven by Heptio, used by the Amazon EKS open source team as a starting point for mapping AWS IAM to Kubernetes RBAC, and donated to the Kubernetes Cloud Provider SIG. A 2019 AWS post described the renamed AWS IAM Authenticator and kops integration after the earlier Heptio Authenticator work.

Adoption history

The authenticator became important in the early Amazon EKS and Kubernetes-on-AWS ecosystem because it let kubectl authenticate through IAM rather than long-lived Kubernetes client certificates. AWS blog posts show it used for EKS, kops, LDAP/AD federation patterns, and self-managed Kubernetes clusters on AWS.

The official GitHub page shows a large project footprint for this batch's peer group, with roughly 2.3k stars, hundreds of forks, and more than 1,000 commits. Homebrew analytics showed 3,013 installs in 30 days, 9,650 in 90 days, and 35,664 in 365 days at the time of this batch, making it the dominant package in this batch by package-manager usage.

How it is used

Cluster administrators run the server as a DaemonSet or integrate it with kops, configure the API server to use its token webhook kubeconfig, and define role/user mappings through a mounted config file, an EKS-style ConfigMap, or IAMIdentityMapping custom resources. Users then configure kubectl exec authentication to call `aws-iam-authenticator token` for a cluster ID.

The client token is based on a signed STS GetCallerIdentity request with the cluster ID in the request context. The README documents AWS profile selection through kubeconfig exec environment variables and maps roles/users/accounts to Kubernetes usernames and groups for RBAC.

Why package nerds care

For package nerds, aws-iam-authenticator is a canonical Kubernetes cloud-provider sidecar CLI: a single binary that lives at the boundary of kubectl exec plugins, AWS STS signing, kops, EKS, and Kubernetes SIG ownership. It is also a useful marker of the transition from early Heptio/EKS bootstrap tooling to more integrated Kubernetes authentication workflows.

Timeline

• 2018: AWS Open Source Blog describes aws-iam-authenticator as an initially Heptio-driven community project used by the Amazon EKS open source team.
• 2019: AWS posts updated kops deployment guidance for AWS IAM Authenticator after the Heptio Authenticator donation to Cloud Provider SIG.
• 2026: Homebrew formula metadata packages aws-iam-authenticator v0.7.18.

Related projects

• Heptio Authenticator: the earlier name/history described by AWS blog posts.
• Amazon EKS: a major adoption driver for IAM-backed Kubernetes authentication.
• kops: Kubernetes-on-AWS cluster tooling with integration guidance for the authenticator.

Sources

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/deploying-aws-iam-authenticator-kubernetes-kops/
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/integrating-ldap-ad-users-kubernetes-rbac-aws-iam-authenticator-project/
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/aws-iam-authenticator.json
• https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator