Fetching from SSM Param Store

The AWS SSM Param Store can be a great way to store and fetch values that you may need to keep secret. Simply using the aws-cli you can add this to a script or even just import the right package for your language.

This post will focus on just the aws-cli.

Put

 aws ssm put-parameter \
        --name "staging_key" \
        --type "String" \
        --value "the-bees-knees"

Get

aws ssm get-parameter \
        --name "staging_key"

Now the bread and butter is when you need to fetch multiple variables. The best way to do so is with hierarchy, for example, /stage/$STAGE-API-KEY. If all your keys for a given environment have /stage/* then you can fetch them all in one quick transaction using get-parameter-by-path:

aws ssm get-parameters-by-path \
    --path "/stage"

I wrote this quick post because of just how useful this was and somewhat hidden for me, as at the time I had not seen this similar functionality in the AWS Console.