AWS Toolkit says you are not logged in — how credentials are resolved

Updated 17 August 2026

"Not logged in" almost always means the credential chain resolved to nothing, or the session it found has expired.

Where the IDE looks

~/.aws/config and ~/.aws/credentials profiles
Environment variables such as AWS_PROFILE, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
An active IAM Identity Center (SSO) session cached under ~/.aws/sso/cache

The usual cause: an expired SSO session

SSO sessions expire on a schedule set by your organisation — often 8 to 12 hours. The cached token stays on disk after it expires, so tools can look configured while every call fails. Re-authenticate and try again.

Check what the IDE actually sees

In a terminal, run aws sts get-caller-identity --profile <your-profile>. If that fails, the problem is your credentials, not the plugin.
If it succeeds in the terminal but not in the IDE, the IDE is using a different profile or a different environment. Check which profile the plugin has selected.

A note on security

Do not paste access keys into a plugin dialog if you can avoid it. Profiles and SSO keep credentials out of application settings, and they are what the IDE tooling is designed to read.

Disclosure

These guides are written by sellerkit. We publish JetBrains IDE plugins for AWS, and the ones relevant to this page are listed below. Everything above works whether or not you use them.

Our plugins declare no upper IDE build limit, and each release is run through the JetBrains Plugin Verifier against multiple IDE versions before it ships.