Skip to main content

Access the AWS console

First ensure that your access has been set up by the team. If you need to add someone to the GovWifi AWS account follow this guide.

Access is via gds-users, and then assuming your role from the GovWifi account. You must be on the VPN to access the console.

Staging and Production are hosted in different AWS accounts.

Ask the reliability engineers for the GovWifi account IDs. AWS roles are in the form firstname.lastname-admin or firstname.lastname-readonly.

Using cod-cli

This utility is being replaced with cod-cli (https://github.com/GovWifi/cod-cli).

The remainder of this section is retained until everyone has migrated to cod-cli

You can also use the cod-cli to access the GovWifi AWS console.

Review the configuration instructions on the gds-cli README to set it up. Note: gds-cli may be aliased to gds. Indepth guidance on setting up the gds-cli can be found on GDS’s help pages.

Once the gds-cli is set up, run the following command from anywhere in your terminal to login as read-only to Production:

$ gds aws govwifi-readonly -l

If you have admin privileges in the Production AWS account, you can run a similar command to login as admin:

$ gds aws govwifi -l

You can login as read-only to Staging by running the following command:

$ gds aws govwifi-staging-readonly -l

You can login as admin to Staging by running the following command:

$ gds aws govwifi-staging -l

You can login as admin to Development by running the following command:

$ gds aws govwifi-development -l

You can login as admin to Tools by running the following command:

$ gds aws govwifi-tools -l

You can login as admin to Recovery by running the following command:

$ gds aws govwifi-recovery -l

Extend Session time

By default the session time is 1 hour, then you get logged out, this can br frustrating, especially if you have several tabs open, thankfully there is a way to fix this.

From CLI

cod-cli aws govwifi-development -l --art 8h

From Console.

  • Log into AWS console,
  • Switch to desired env, eg Dev, Staging, Prod.
  • Goto IAM
  • Goto Role
  • Search for your name.
  • Select your role.
  • Click Edit
  • Change Maximum session duration
  • Save
This page was last reviewed on 8 August 2025. It needs to be reviewed again on 8 August 2026 by the page owner #govwifi .