ERROR chef powershell ec2 - powershell

Question

I am trying to connect to ec2 (AWS) from my powershell (windows7)
I added the following lines to the knife.rb file:
knife[:aws_access_key_id] = ENV['XXXXXX']
knife[:aws_secret_access_key] = ENV['xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx']
I run for example
knife ec2 server list --region eu-west-1
but get the following:
knife : ERROR: You did not provide a valid 'AWS Access Key Id' value. At line:1 char:1
ERROR: You did ... Key Id' value.:String) [], RemoteException
ERROR: You did not provide a valid 'AWS Secret Access Key' value.
do I need to upload the knife.rb file to the server after I saved it? (how?)
where should I save my pem file and how should I use it in the commands? i tried for example:
knife ec2 server create -I ami-6e7bd919 -N MyEc2Instance -x ec2-user -r "role[webserver]" -i C:\Users\MyName\Documents\openvoip.pem --region eu-west-1
Thanks!

Answer 1

The knife.rb file should have the following and not as described in the question:
knife[:aws_access_key_id] = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
knife[:aws_secret_access_key] = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
I had no such ENV variables, so I set the credentials directly.

Answer 2

To use environment variables you have to put them first in you ~/.bashrc file:
vi ~/.bashrc
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=/home/yourname/.ec2/prodaccess
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=/home/yourname/.ec2/prodsecret
Save. then Source .bashrc file:
. ~/.bashrc
Run: env # to see if your new variables are propagated to environment. Then you may run your knife ec2 command

Answer 3

If you plan on sharing your knife.rb, you might want to keep the environment variables and setup as described under 'Many Users, Same Repo' in the docs, https://docs.getchef.com/config_rb_knife.html.
In order to use the ENV vars, use something like below as opposed to the key values that you appear to use:
knife[:aws_access_key_id] = ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID']
knife[:aws_secret_access_key] = ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']
Then, when running knife, ensure your local environment variables are set.