DynamoDBLocal Fails on Credentials

Question

DynamoDBLocal is rejecting my credentials in spite of the documentation indicating that valid credentials are unnecessary:

The AWS SDKs for DynamoDB require that your application configuration specify an access key value and an AWS region value...these do not have to be valid AWS values in order to run locally.

In this case, I've set up my credentials ~/.aws/credentials as:

[default] 
aws_access_key_id = BogusAwsAccessKeyId
aws_secret_access_key = BogusAwsSecretAccessKey

run DynamoDBLocal using:

java -Djava.library.path=./DynamoDBLoc_lib -jar DynamoDBLocal.jar 

checked that it's working by hitting http://localhost:8000/shell/

then run my test Java app:

    DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain credentialProvider = new DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain();
    AWSCredentials awsCredentials = credentialProvider.getCredentials();
    log.info("creds \"{}\", \"{}\"", awsCredentials.getAWSAccessKeyId(), awsCredentials.getAWSSecretKey());

    AmazonDynamoDBClient client = new AmazonDynamoDBClient(credentialProvider);
    client.withEndpoint("http://localhost:8000");
    client.withRegion(Regions.US_WEST_2);
    dynamoDB = new DynamoDB(client);

    try {
        TableCollection<ListTablesResult> tables = dynamoDB.listTables();
        while (tables.iterator().hasNext()) {   // <-- exception thrown here
            log.info(tables.iterator().next().getTableName());
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        log.error("", e);
  }

which results in this output:

creds "BogusAwsAccessKeyId", "BogusAwsSecretAccessKey" com.amazonaws.AmazonServiceException: The security token included in the request is invalid. (Service: AmazonDynamoDBv2; Status Code: 400; Error Code: UnrecognizedClientException

Any thoughts on why it is concerned with the validity of the credentials?

Answer 1

In your code, you are calling withRegion() after calling setEndpoint(). The call to withRegion() is setting the endpoint to DynamoDB's us-west-2 endpoint and that's why your authentication is failing (because it's actually going to the DynamoDB us-west-2 region). Remove the withRegion() line.