Profiles

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.

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":

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$ twilio login
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You can find your Account SID and Auth Token at https://www.twilio.com/console
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 » 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.
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? The Account SID for your Twilio Account or Subaccount: ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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? Your Twilio Auth Token for your Twilio Account or Subaccount: [hidden]
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? Shorthand identifier for your profile: dev

If you need to work with resources in a specific Twilio Region, you can create a regional profile that includes both region and edge location.

When creating a regional profile, you must specify both --region and --edge flags:

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$ twilio login --region ie1 --edge dublin
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You can find your Account SID and Auth Token at https://www.twilio.com/console
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 » Your Auth Token will be used once to create an API Key for future CLI access
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? The Account SID for your Twilio Account: ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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? Your Twilio Auth Token (must be IE1-specific): [hidden]
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? Shorthand identifier for your profile: ireland-prod
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Created API Key SKxxxx and stored the secret in your profile.
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Saved ireland-prod.

Each Twilio Region has its own Auth Token. When creating a regional profile, you must use the Auth Token for that specific region, not your default US1 Auth Token.

To obtain region-specific credentials:

1. Log in to the Twilio Console and navigate to API keys & tokens.
2. In the Region dropdown, select your target region.
3. In the Live credentials section, click the eye icon to view the Auth Token for that region.

Regional profiles are useful when you need to:

• Ensure data residency: Keep all data processing within a specific geographic region for compliance.
• Reduce latency: Route requests through the closest edge location to your users.
• Manage multi-region deployments: Maintain separate profiles for different regional environments (e.g., australia-prod, ireland-staging).

Learn more about regional configuration.

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

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

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

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 console
• TWILIO_API_KEY - an API Key SID
• TWILIO_API_SECRET - the secret for the API Key
• TWILIO_REGION (optional) - the Region for the account (default is 'us1'). When using a regional profile, ensure you also specify the appropriate edge location.
• TWILIO_EDGE (optional) - the Edge Location for API requests

If these environment variables are set, a profile is not required to issue commands with the Twilio CLI.

The CLI will attempt to load credentials in the following order of priority:

1. From the profile specified by the -p parameter
2. From environment variables, if set
3. From the active profile