How to test AWS OpenSearch Serverless Auth in Postman

Christina Hastenrath
2 min readMar 4

AWS credentials, ElasticSearch, AWS Signed Request, IAM Policy

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Unsplash

OpenSearch Serverless is a pre-configured serverless setup for Amazon OpenSearch Service that allows you to search and analyze large amounts of data without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure.

OpenSearch Serverless removes the complexities of configuring, tuning and managing OpenSearch clusters and enables you to focus on working with your data.

This post will guide you on how to set up and test your AWS OpenSearch Serverless configuration in Postman.

It assumes that you have already set up your AWS OpenSearch Serverless collection.
If you haven’t, you can follow the Amazon OpenSearch Serverless Getting Started Guide from steps 1 to 3.

After configuring permissions, creating a collection, and uploading search data, you can test AWS authentication in Postman for your collection endpoint.

To do so, create a new GET request in Postman. Use the following URL for the request:

https://<collection-id>.<your-region>.aoss.amazonaws.com/<name-of-your-index>/_search

💡 The endpoint for your OpenSearch Serverless collection is provided in the Overview tab of the collection.
The path is Amazon OpenSearch Service > Serverless: Collection > name-of-your-collection.

After configuring the endpoint and replacing <collection-id> and <name-of-index> with your data, proceed to the Auth tab in your Postman request.

To proceed, you will need an AWS Access Key and an AWS Secret Key. You can create these under your IAM user in the IAM Security tab on AWS.

In Postman add these settings in the Auth tab:

👉 Type: `AWS Signature`
👉 Add auth data to: `Request Headers`
👉 AccessKey: `your AWS AccessKey`
👉 SecretKey: `your AWS SecretKey`

Note:
In Postman, you can either copy and paste your keys directly into the authentication fields or create variables.
I created environment variables and pasted my keys only into the “current” field. If you would like to

Christina Hastenrath

Molecular Biologist turned Software Engineer. I write about my code. Connect with me on Twitter @etTinchen