Feature request: set AWS_PROFILE directly from Go to remove Bash/PowerShell wrapper dependency

[arush-sal]

Summary

Would it be possible to set AWS_PROFILE directly from the Go code, so users could drop the Bash/PowerShell wrapper (alias awsd="source _awsd") dependency entirely?

Motivation

Today awsd relies on being sourced into the calling shell so the export reaches the parent process. This means:

• Every user must add a shell-specific alias (source _awsd for bash/zsh, a separate function for PowerShell).
• Onboarding/installation has an extra manual step that's easy to get wrong.
• Cross-shell support means maintaining parallel wrapper logic.

Removing the wrapper would simplify install to a single binary and reduce per-shell maintenance.

What I'm asking for

Set AWS_PROFILE (and AWS_REGION/AWS_DEFAULT_REGION) directly via the Go code instead of relying on the shell wrapper to export them.

Note on the constraint (for discussion)

I recognize a child process can't mutate its parent shell's environment directly — which is presumably why the source _awsd approach exists today. Possible directions the author might consider:

• Spawn a child shell from Go with the env vars set (os/exec + Env), so awsd drops the user into a configured subshell.
• Emit shell-eval output and document a thin awsd() { eval "$(awsd-bin "$@")" } shim — still a wrapper, but generated/managed by the tool rather than hand-added.
• Write to ~/.awsd (already done) and lean on a generated shellenv-style hook (like Homebrew's eval "$(brew shellenv)").

Any of these would still touch the shell, but could centralize/standardize the integration rather than requiring users to hand-write per-shell aliases. Curious whether a fully wrapper-free approach is feasible. Thanks for the tool!

[pjaudiomv]

Thanks for the thoughtful writeup, you've already identified the core constraint correctly, so let me confirm it and then talk about what I think we can do.

Fully wrapper-free isn't possible

There's no supported way for a child process to mutate its parent shell's environment — no syscall, no API. The tricks people occasionally cite (ptrace-injecting the parent, writing to /proc/<ppid>/mem) are non-portable, blocked by SIP on macOS, and would be a much worse experience than the alias. So awsd will always need some shell-side integration. That's exactly why source _awsd exists.

On your three alternatives:

1. Subshell via os/exec + Env — this genuinely works with no wrapper, but I don't think it's a good trade. Nested shells accumulate, exit semantics get confusing, shell history and job control fragment, and prompt integration (showing AWS_PROFILE in $PROMPT, which is a documented feature) stops behaving predictably. It also breaks the common awsd work && terraform apply flow, since the rest of the command line runs in the parent, not the subshell.
2. eval "$(awsd-bin "$@")" shim — same category as today's source _awsd; no net win on its own.
3. shellenv-style generated hook — this is the one worth doing, and I'd like to.

What I'd rather build: awsd init <shell>

It doesn't remove the wrapper, but it removes everything the issue actually complains about — hand-written per-shell config, the easy-to-get-wrong install step, and parallel wrapper logic I have to maintain.

Worth naming the real problem here: a complete install today is the alias, plus source _awsd_autocomplete, plus the ~15-line persistence block copy-pasted out of the README. That persistence block reimplements the ~/.awsd KV parsing a fourth time, after scripts/_awsd, scripts/powershell/awsd.ps1, and the Go in src/utils/common.go. Four copies of one file-format contract, in three shell dialects, is the maintenance burden — the alias itself is the small part.

So: replace all of it with one line per shell.

eval "$(awsd init zsh)" # or bash | fish | powershell

awsd init emits, from Go: the awsd() function, the export/unset logic, the completion hookup, and the load-on-new-shell persistence. I'd structure it as two binary calls so the interactive picker keeps a real stdout to draw on (command substitution would otherwise swallow the promptui UI):

awsd() {
 command _awsd_prompt "$@" || return
 eval "$(command _awsd_prompt shellenv)"
}

shellenv reads ~/.awsd through the existing utils.ReadState and prints properly quoted export/unset lines.

What that buys:

• scripts/_awsd, scripts/powershell/awsd.ps1, and scripts/_awsd_autocomplete collapse into generated output — one install artifact, one source of truth for the file format.
• Adding fish or nushell becomes a Go template instead of a new hand-written script.
• The README persistence snippet goes away entirely.

Two implementation notes for whoever picks this up: shellenv output needs real shell quoting, since profile names can contain spaces and quotes; and init and shellenv both have to be added to the reserved-word list in src/cmd/root.go, or the direct-switch dispatcher will interpret them as profile names.

Leaving this open as the tracking issue for awsd init.

[pjaudiomv]

Shipped in v0.3.0: https://github.com/radiusmethod/awsd/releases/tag/v0.3.0

awsd init <shell> now generates the whole integration. One line in your rc file replaces the alias, the completion source, and the persistence block:

eval "$(awsd init zsh)" # bash | zsh | fish | powershell

Still a shell function, for the reason you identified, but nothing is hand-written per shell anymore and the ~/.awsd
parsing lives in one place. fish support and PowerShell completion came along with it.

The old alias awsd="source _awsd" still works and is now a thin shim over awsd shellenv. It's deprecated and will go
away in a later release. See the "Upgrading from pre-v0.3.0" section in the README if you're already set up.