Configuring Terraform provider AWS

This is what I am getting when trying to Terraform plan for the first time.

Error: error configuring Terraform AWS Provider: error validating provider credentials: error calling sts:GetCallerIdentity: operation error STS: GetCallerIdentity, https response error StatusCode: 403, RequestID: 96f0839a-abf6-415c-b886-66d41933cbc8, api error InvalidClientTokenId: The security token included in the request is invalid.

• Created new IAM user on AWS
• Used same credentials on the VScode extension on it worked for the extension.

I expect this to work smoothly, as I ran out of errors to check for.

The problem is that you are setting the attribute with a string intead to read the variable value.

Instead of

provider "aws" {
  region     = "us-west-1"
  access_key = "var.access_key"
  secret_key = "var.secret_key"
}

you should remove the quotes so it can read the variables values.

provider "aws" {
  region     = "us-west-1"
  access_key = var.access_key
  secret_key = var.secret_key
}