Authentication

Overview

Snowflake supports multiple authentication methods. The Snowflake emulator supports the following authentication methods:

• Username and password
• RSA key pair authentication

This guide demonstrates how to use the Snowflake emulator to authenticate using both methods.

Username and password

To authenticate using a username and password, you can set the user and password parameters in the connection string. The values for these parameters can be set to test in the Snowflake emulator. Since the Snowflake emulator is a local instance, the username and password can be the same, and the authentication mechanism is mocked.

Here’s an example of how to connect to the Snowflake emulator using a username and password in a Python script:

import snowflake.connector as sf

sf_conn_obj = sf.connect(
    user="test",
    password="test",
    account="test",
    database="test",
    host="snowflake.localhost.localstack.cloud",
)

The default username and password are set to test and can be changed using SF_DEFAULT_USER and SF_DEFAULT_PASSWORD when starting the Snowflake emulator.

RSA key pair authentication

The Snowflake emulator supports RSA key-based authentication, allowing users to log in without a password by using a private key and a configured public key.

To enable this, create a private key and a public key pair.

openssl genrsa -out private_key.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in private_key.pem -pubout -out public_key.pem

Then set a public key for the user:

ALTER USER your_user_name SET RSA_PUBLIC_KEY='<public_key>';

Then authenticate with the private key using the Snowflake client:

import snowflake.connector

conn = snowflake.connector.connect(
    user='your_user_name',
    account='your_account_identifier',
    private_key_file='/path/to/private_key.pem',
    # Add other parameters as needed
)