Managing Amazon DocumentDB users

In Amazon DocumentDB, users authenticate to a cluster in conjunction with a password. Each cluster has primary sign-in credentials that are established during cluster creation.

Primary and serviceadmin user

A newly created Amazon DocumentDB cluster has two users: the primary user and the serviceadmin user.

The primary user is a single, privileged user that can perform administrative tasks and create additional users with roles. When you connect to an Amazon DocumentDB cluster for the first time, you must authenticate using the primary sign-in credentials. The primary user receives these administrative permissions for an Amazon DocumentDB cluster when that cluster is created, and is granted the role of root.

The serviceadmin user is created implicitly when the cluster is created. Every Amazon DocumentDB cluster has a serviceadmin user that provides AWS the ability to manage your cluster. You cannot log in as, drop, rename, change the password, or change the permissions for serviceadmin. Any attempt to do so results in an error.

Creating additional users

After you connect as the primary user (or any user that has the role createUser), you can create a new user, as shown below.

db.createUser(
    {
        user: "sample-user-1",
        pwd: "password123",
        roles: 
            [{"db":"admin", "role":"dbAdminAnyDatabase" }]
    }
)
      

To view user details, you can use the show users command as follows. You can additionally remove users with the dropUser command. For more information, see Common commands.

show users
{ 
    "_id" : "serviceadmin",
    "user" : "serviceadmin",
    "db" : "admin",
    "roles" : [
    	{
            "role" : "root",
            "db" : "admin"
        }
    ]
},

{ 
    "_id" : "myPrimaryUser",
    "user" : "myPrimaryUser",
    "db" : "admin",
    "roles" : [
    	{
            "role" : "root",
            "db" : "admin"
        }
    ]
},

{
    "_id" : "sample-user-1",
    "user" : "sample-user-1",
    "db" : "admin",
    "roles" : [
    	{
            "role" : "dbAdminAnyDatabase",
            "db" : "admin"
    	}
    ]
}
      

In the example above, the new user sample-user-1 is attributed to the admin database. This is always the case for a new user. Amazon DocumentDB does not have the concept of an authenticationDatabase and thus all authentication is performed in the context of the admin database.

When creating users, if you omit the db field when specifying the role, Amazon DocumentDB will implicitly attribute the role to the database in which the connection is being issued against. For example, if your connection is issued against the database sample-database and you run the following command, the user sample-user-2 will be created in the admin database and will have readWrite permissions to the database sample-database.

db.createUser(
    {
        user: "sample-user-2", 
        pwd: "password123", 
        roles: 
            ["readWrite"]
    }
)
      

Creating users with roles that are scoped across all databases (for example, readInAnyDatabase) require that you are either in the context of the admin database when creating the user or you explicitly state the database for the role when creating the user.

To switch the context of your database, you can use the following command.

use admin

To learn more about Role Based Access Control and enforcing least privilege amongst the users in your cluster, see Database access using Role-Based Access Control.

Automatically rotating passwords for Amazon DocumentDB

With AWS Secrets Manager, you can replace hardcoded credentials in your code (including passwords) with an API call to Secrets Manager to retrieve the secret programmatically. This helps ensure that the secret can't be compromised by someone examining your code, because the secret simply isn't there. Also, you can configure Secrets Manager to automatically rotate the secret for you according to a schedule that you specify. This enables you to replace long-term secrets with short-term ones, which helps to significantly reduce the risk of compromise.

Using Secrets Manager, you can automatically rotate your Amazon DocumentDB passwords (that is, secrets) using an AWS Lambda function that Secrets Manager provides.

For more information about AWS Secrets Manager and native integration with Amazon DocumentDB, see the following: