The AWS SDK throws "Region is missing" when S3Client is constructed
with an empty-string region, so any S3 feature (avatars, attachments,
presigned URL generation) is silently broken when S3_REGION is unset
— even though .env.example ships it unset and env.ts declares it
optional. The schema and the runtime disagreed about whether the var
was required.
Default to "us-east-1" in createS3Client. S3-compatible providers
(MinIO, Backblaze B2, R2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi) ignore the
region entirely; real AWS S3 users should set S3_REGION explicitly
to their bucket's actual region (clarified in .env.example).
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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