Configuration

amz runs with sensible defaults and no config file. Everything below is overridable per command with a flag, and the common settings can be pinned in a config file or environment.

Marketplaces

-m / --marketplace selects the storefront. amz knows the major Amazon marketplaces by short slug:

us  uk  de  fr  it  es  ca  jp  in  au  br  mx  nl  se  pl  sg

Each slug sets the host, currency, and language for every URL amz builds. An unknown slug is a usage error (exit 2).

amz product B075F5X8BR -m uk
amz info                 # shows the resolved marketplace and access tier

The polite-fetch path

amz is built to read Amazon without hammering it. The defaults:

Flag	Default	What it does
--rate	3s	minimum delay between requests
--retries	3	retries on a 429/503 with backoff
--timeout	30s	per-request timeout

Requests carry amz-cli/<version> (+https://github.com/tamnd/amz-cli) and two other headers, never a browser string, and successful pages are cached on disk so a repeat is free. --no-cache bypasses the cache, --refresh ignores the cached copy but repopulates it.

Access tiers

amz reads two tiers, selected per run:

• Public HTML, the default, no setup.
• PA-API, --api, uses the official Product Advertising API 5.0 with credentials, signed locally.

Configuration file

amz config manages an optional TOML file:

amz config path          # where it lives
amz config init          # write a starter file
amz config show          # the resolved configuration (credentials masked)

Those three are the whole surface. There is no subcommand that writes a credential, because a secret typed at a shell prompt is a secret in the shell history. amz config init writes this and nothing else:

# amz configuration
marketplace = "us"
rate = "3s"
retries = 3

# Official Product Advertising API (opt-in). Prefer environment variables:
#   AMZ_PAAPI_ACCESS_KEY, AMZ_PAAPI_SECRET_KEY, AMZ_PAAPI_PARTNER_TAG
# [paapi]
# access_key = ""
# secret_key = ""
# partner_tag = ""

marketplace, rate and retries are the three keys worth setting, and each one is the default for the flag of the same name. The [paapi] block is commented out and stays that way for most people: the environment variables above are the supported path, and the file is there for a machine where setting an environment variable is the harder of the two.

The file lives under the XDG config directory (~/.config/amz/ on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support/amz/ style paths on macOS via XDG).

Environment variables

Variable	Effect
AMZ_DATA_DIR	root for the local store and database
AMZ_CACHE_DIR	the on-disk page cache
AMZ_PAAPI_ACCESS_KEY	PA-API access key
AMZ_PAAPI_SECRET_KEY	PA-API secret key
AMZ_PAAPI_PARTNER_TAG	PA-API partner tag
AMZ_BASE_URL	override the base URL (testing and proxies)
XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME, XDG_CONFIG_HOME	standard XDG paths

Paths

By default amz keeps its data under the XDG data directory and its cache under the XDG cache directory, with the SQLite store at <data>/amz.db. amz db path and amz cache info print the resolved locations, and --data-dir moves the whole lot, which is the easy way to keep one store per project.

Keys that do not exist

--no-robots is a flag and only a flag. There is no no_robots config key and no AMZ_NO_ROBOTS environment variable, and amz has tests asserting that neither ever appears. A stop signal you can turn off in a file you forgot about is not a stop signal.

The same is true of the pace floor. --rate can raise it and nothing lowers it.