Documentation

Frost documentation

Everything Frost does, how each piece works, and every setting you can change. Start with the walkthrough, or jump straight to the feature you are looking at.

Start here

Getting started Install Frost, point it at your access portal, and see what the first refresh does. Platforms & updates Which builds exist, how each platform updates, and what differs between them.

How Frost works

One page per feature. If you are trying to understand why a file on your disk looks the way it does, the profiles and ~/.aws/config pages are the ones you want.

Credential refresh When Frost refreshes, how the token is obtained, and what a run writes. Signing in The login window, the default-browser mode, security keys and passkeys. Profile names How account and permission set names become profile names — and how to shorten them. The ~/.aws/config file What Frost owns in that file, what it never touches, and how upgrades avoid duplicates. App window & tray A tour of the six pages in the settings window and the tray menu behind them. Activity & logs The per-run record of every step, and the log files that go with it.

Integrations

What Frost does with your credentials once it has them. EKS is the first AWS service it wires up for you; more will follow.

EKS cluster discovery The region scan, the kubeconfig merge, and how contexts get their names. Bundled IAM authenticator The helper binary that lets kubectl talk to EKS without the AWS CLI.

Settings

Settings overview Every setting, its default, and where it is stored — in one table. Login The access portal URL and region, and how they are validated. Behavior Auto-open or notify, in-app window or default browser, and the refresh hotkey. Privacy Retention for run history and logs, and erasing them on demand.

Reference

Security & privacy What is stored, with which permissions, and what is deliberately never logged. Files & locations Every path Frost reads or writes, on all three platforms. Troubleshooting Failed refreshes, missing notifications, kubectl auth errors, and where to look.

Frost in one page

Frost is a menu-bar app for people whose AWS access comes from IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO). Instead of running aws configure sso once and aws sso login forever after, you give Frost your access portal URL. From then on it:

keeps an SSO token alive, refreshing it as it expires — credential refresh;
writes a profile per account and permission set into ~/.aws/config, leaving everything else in that file untouched — profile names, the config file;
writes the SSO token into the cache the AWS CLI reads, so aws --profile … works without a separate login — files & locations;
scans every region for EKS clusters and keeps ~/.kube/config current — EKS discovery;
records what each run did, so a failure is something you can read rather than guess at — activity & logs.

There is no account to create, no server to talk to, and no telemetry. Frost is open source under Apache 2.0.