AppConfig local development improvement

Question

I kept running into the following error, and after spending a lot of time researching, I finally realized that the issue was due to a missing SERVICE_REGION environment variable. It took me quite a while to track this down, so if possible, could you update your Q/A section to mention this and explain how to set it up? I’m sure it would save others a lot of time and be very helpful.

Thanks

```dev-dsk-rtrup-2a-a9d80777 % sudo systemctl status aws-appconfig-agent
● aws-appconfig-agent.service - aws-appconfig-agent
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/aws-appconfig-agent.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: activating (auto-restart) (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2025-09-04 18:42:53 UTC; 7s ago
  Process: 18108 ExecStart=/opt/aws/aws-appconfig-agent/bin/aws-appconfig-agent (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
 Main PID: 18108 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Sep 04 18:42:53 dev-dsk-rtrup-2a-a9d80777.us-west-2.amazon.com systemd[1]: Unit aws-appconfig-agent.service entered failed state.
Sep 04 18:42:53 dev-dsk-rtrup-2a-a9d80777.us-west-2.amazon.com systemd[1]: aws-appconfig-agent.service failed.```

re:Post Agent · Accepted Answer

When running the AWS AppConfig Agent, you need to specify the AWS Region where your AppConfig resources are located. The error you encountered is likely due to the missing SERVICE_REGION environment variable, which is required for the agent to know which AWS Region to connect to.

To resolve this issue, you should set the SERVICE_REGION environment variable to the appropriate AWS Region code (e.g., us-east-1, us-west-2) where your AppConfig resources are deployed. This can be done in different ways depending on your deployment method:

1. For the AWS AppConfig Agent running as a system service (as in your case), you can modify the service configuration to include the environment variable. You might need to edit the service file at `/etc/systemd/system/aws-appconfig-agent.service` to add:
```
Environment="SERVICE_REGION=us-west-2"
```
(Replace us-west-2 with your actual AWS Region)

2. For Lambda functions using the AWS AppConfig Agent extension, you would set the `AWS_APPCONFIG_EXTENSION_SERVICE_REGION` environment variable.

3. For container deployments like Amazon EKS DaemonSets, you would include the SERVICE_REGION in your manifest file.

After setting the environment variable, restart the service with:
```
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart aws-appconfig-agent
```

Explicitly setting the AWS Region is a best practice when working with AWS services as it improves performance by avoiding the need for the SDK to consult the default Region provider chain, which can cause delays.  
**Sources**  
[Configuring the AWS AppConfig Agent Lambda extension - AWS AppConfig](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appconfig/latest/userguide/appconfig-integration-lambda-extensions-config.html)  
[(Optional) Running AWS AppConfig as a DaemonSet in Amazon EKS - AWS AppConfig](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appconfig/latest/userguide/appconfig-integration-containers-agent-daemon.html)  
[Region specification missing from AWS client initialization | Amazon Q, Detector Library](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codeguru/detector-library/java/aws-service-client-initialization/index.html)  
[Region specification missing from AWS client initialization | Amazon Q, Detector Library](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/detector-library/java/aws-service-client-initialization/index.html)

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