Updating a service account

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Updated at January 20, 2026

You can change a service account's name and description. Using the Yandex Cloud API you can also label a service account.

To change a service account's roles, follow this guide.

Management console

CLI

Terraform

API

To update a service account:

In the management console, click in the top panel and select the folder the service account belongs to.
In the list of services, select Identity and Access Management.
In the left-hand panel, select Service accounts.
In the row with the service account you need, click and select **Edit **.
Change the name of your service account.

Follow these naming requirements:
- It must be from 2 to 63 characters long.
- It can only contain lowercase Latin letters, numbers, and hyphens.
- It must start with a letter and cannot end with a hyphen.
Change the description of your service account.
Click Save.

If you do not have the Yandex Cloud CLI installed yet, install and initialize it.

To update a service account:

See the description of the update service account command:
```
yc iam service-account update --help
```

Select a service account, e.g., my-robot:

yc iam service-account list

Result:

+----------------------+------------------+-------------------------------+
|          ID          |       NAME       |          DESCRIPTION          |
+----------------------+------------------+-------------------------------+
| aje6o61dvog2******** | my-robot         |                               |
| aje9sda1ufvq******** | account_name     | account_description           |
+----------------------+------------------+-------------------------------+

Change the service account parameters, such as name and description:
```
yc iam service-account update my-robot \
  --new-name my-service-account \
  --description "this is my service account"
```
Follow these naming requirements:
- It must be from 2 to 63 characters long.
- It can only contain lowercase Latin letters, numbers, and hyphens.
- It must start with a letter and cannot end with a hyphen.

If you do not have Terraform yet, install it and configure the Yandex Cloud provider.

To update a service account:

Open the Terraform configuration file and edit the fragment with the service account description.
Example of the service account description in the Terraform configuration:
```
...
resource "yandex_iam_service_account" "sa" {
  name        = "my-robot"
  description = "this is new description"
 }
...
```
Check the configuration using this command:
```
terraform validate
```
If the configuration is correct, you will get this message:
```
Success! The configuration is valid.
```
Run this command:
```
terraform plan
```
You will see a detailed list of resources. No changes will be made at this step. If the configuration contains any errors, Terraform will show them.
Apply the changes:
```
terraform apply
```
Confirm the changes: type yes into the terminal and press Enter.

You can check whether the service account has been updated in the management console or using the CLI command:
```
yc iam service-account list
```

To update a service account, use the update REST API method for the ServiceAccount resource or the ServiceAccountService/Update gRPC API call.

Updating a service account

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