Adding an AWS profile

You don’t need to edit ~/.aws/credentials by hand — Tablyne can add a named profile for you and connect to it immediately.

Opening the dialog

Open the Add profile dialog from either place:

• The ＋ button next to the profile dropdown in the connection bar.
• The Add profile button on the welcome screen (shown prominently when you have no profiles yet).

Filling it in

The dialog asks for four fields:

Field	Notes
Name	The profile name (e.g. dev, prod). Becomes the section header in your AWS files.
Access key ID	Starts with AKIA….
Secret access key	Stored masked in the input; written to ~/.aws/credentials.
Region	Default region for the profile. One of the five supported regions.

The Save button stays disabled until name, access key and secret are all filled in.

What gets written

When you save, Tablyne appends to your standard AWS files — exactly where the AWS CLI keeps credentials. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

# ~/.aws/credentials
[dev]
aws_access_key_id = AKIA...
aws_secret_access_key = ...

# ~/.aws/config
[profile dev]
region = us-east-1

A few details worth knowing:

• The region is only written to ~/.aws/config if you provided one and the profile section doesn’t already exist there.
• For a profile literally named default, the config section is written as [default] (no profile prefix), matching AWS conventions.
• Existing content is appended to, never rewritten — your other profiles, comments and settings are left untouched.

Refusing to overwrite

Tablyne will not overwrite a profile that already exists. If a section with the same name is already in ~/.aws/credentials, saving fails with:

profile ‘dev’ already exists

To change an existing profile’s keys, edit ~/.aws/credentials directly (or remove the section first), then add it again.

After saving

On success, Tablyne:

1. Refreshes the profile list so the new profile appears in the dropdowns.
2. Immediately connects to the new profile and region.
3. Clears the form and closes the dialog.

The sidebar then loads the table list for the new connection. See Connecting to AWS for switching between profiles afterwards.

A note on credential type

This dialog stores long-lived access keys. Tablyne does not manage temporary credentials, role assumption, MFA session tokens, or AWS SSO sign-in. If your organization uses SSO or assumed roles, generate or refresh credentials through your normal tooling and Tablyne will read the resulting profile from the shared files.

Security

Your keys are written only to your local AWS files and used to sign requests from your own machine. Treat ~/.aws/credentials as sensitive — anyone with read access to it can use those keys. For day-to-day development with no AWS account at all, you can skip credentials entirely and use DynamoDB Local.

For background on AWS profiles, see the connection learn guide.