Profiles
Profiles allow you to store and group together credentials and certain settings in the Twilio CLI. This is handy for persisting your preferred options between terminal sessions, and allows for streamlined context switching between multiple accounts.
Create a profile
To issue CLI commands that include your Twilio credentials, you must first create a profile. To create a profile, use:
twilio login
You will be prompted for your Account SID and Auth Token, both of which you can find on the dashboard of your Twilio console.
When you run twilio login
(an alias for twilio profiles:create
), it uses your Account SID and Auth Token to generate an API key, stores the key in a configuration file, and associates the key with the profile to authenticate future requests.
For security, your Auth Token is only used to generate the API key, and is not stored locally once the profile has been created.
Additional profiles
Use additional profiles to quickly switch between different sets of configurations within the same account, or between entirely different Twilio accounts.
To create additional profiles, run twilio login
again, but provide a different shorthand identifier for the profile when prompted.
For example, to create a profile named "dev":
$ twilio login
You can find your Account SID and Auth Token at https://www.twilio.com/console
» Your Auth Token will be used once to create an API Key for future CLI access to your Twilio Account or Subaccount, and then forgotten.
? The Account SID for your Twilio Account or Subaccount: ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
? Your Twilio Auth Token for your Twilio Account or Subaccount: [hidden]
? Shorthand identifier for your profile: dev
Your Account SID and Auth Token are accessible from the first page of the Twilio Console, under Account Info.
Set an active profile
By default, the credentials associated with the "active" profile are used when you run a Twilio CLI command that doesn't reference a specific profile to use.
To set a profile as "active", run:
twilio profiles:use PROFILE_ID
twilio login
does not set the provided profile as "active". Use the instructions above to set a newly-created profile as the "active" profile.
Use multiple profiles
To use non-active profiles with commands, include -p PROFILE_ID
in the command. This could look like:
twilio phone-numbers:list -p dev
Alternatively, as shown earlier, you may change the active profile with the twilio profiles:use
command:
twilio profiles:use dev
To see the full list of local profiles (including which profile is active), run:
twilio profiles:list
Remove a profile
To remove a profile, use:
twilio profiles:remove PROFILE_ID
For example, if you want to remove the dev
profile, you would execute twilio profiles:remove dev
Use environment variables
Instead of (or in addition to) using a profile, you may define credentials as environment variables before issuing CLI commands.
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID
– your Account SID from the consoleTWILIO_API_KEY
– an API Key SIDTWILIO_API_SECRET
– the secret for the API KeyTWILIO_REGION
(optional) – the Region for the account (default is 'us1')
If these environment variables are set, a profile is not required to issue commands with the Twilio CLI.
If you are in the rare situation where you can not make use of an API Key, you can instead leverage your primary account credentials.
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID
– your Account SIDTWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN
– your Auth Token
This is highly discouraged due to increased risk of exposing your Auth Token.
Precedence of stored credentials
The CLI will attempt to load credentials in the following order of priority:
- From the profile specified by the
-p
parameter - From environment variables, if set
- From the active profile
Need some help?
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