Two environment variables are all you need to make AWS CLI follow XDG Base Directory

When adding AWS CLI to my dotfiles, I wanted the config files under XDG Base Directory instead of ~/.aws/. Putting them in ~/.config/aws/config keeps the home directory clean.

AWS CLI looks like it hardcodes ~/.aws/, but two environment variables are all it takes to change that.

export AWS_CONFIG_FILE="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aws/config"
export AWS_SHARED_CREDENTIALS_FILE="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aws/credentials"

Drop these in zshenv and everything — aws configure, aws sso login — points to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aws/.

While at it, zsh completion is worth setting up too. AWS CLI v2 ships aws_completer, but it works through bash's complete interface. There's no native zsh completion function provided, so you need bashcompinit to load a bash compatibility layer. This is also the method recommended in the official AWS documentation.

if (( $+commands[aws] )); then
  autoload -Uz bashcompinit && bashcompinit
  complete -C aws_completer aws
fi

I keep an SSO profile template (commented out) in aws/config so new machines are ready to go immediately. Since it's a template that varies per environment, the test script should only check for file existence — not content diff.