How to Load config from ~/.aws/config

The answer of sreenivas is correct. It also seems to be the only way to do this without writing a custom function.

I've traced it back in the source code and the the way it loads ~/.aws/config is similar to this pseudocode:

if process.env.AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG:
  return load('~/.aws/credentials').overwrite('~/.aws/config')
else:
  return load('~/.aws/credentials')

This also means you can set the environment variable after require('aws-sdk'), as long as you do it before new SharedIniFileCredentials({..}) or credentials.refresh(). Beware that credentials.get() will not work until the sessiontoken has expired.

There is a little bit of magic in how aws-sdk loads the config

either set the env variable

export AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG="true"

or before loading the aws-sdk set

process.env.AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG = true; 

Then load the aws module;

var AWS = require('aws-sdk');

You can access the region directly by

AWS.config.region