AWS IAM – How to show describe policy statements using the CLI?

Question:

How can I use the AWS CLI to show an IAM policy’s full body including the Effect, Action and Resource statements?

“aws iam list-policies” command lists all the policies but not the actual JSON E,A,R statements contained within the policy.

I could use the “aws iam get-policy-version” command but this does not show the policy name in its output. When I am running this command via a script to obtain information for dozens of policies, there is no way to know which policy the output will belong to.

Is there another way of doing this?

Answer:

The only to do this as you’ve said is the following:

  • Get all IAM Policies via the list-policies verb.
  • Loop over the output, taking the “PolicyId” and “DefaultVersionId”.
  • Pass these into the get-policy-version verb.
  • Map the PolicyName from the iteration to the PolicyVersion.Document value in the second request.

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