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Kiro CLI is AWS’s agentic terminal client — the IDE agent built for developers who live in the terminal. This pack installs Kiro CLI v2, pre-installs five AWS MCP servers (Terraform, ECS, EKS, core, and documentation), and gives you a choice of two auth paths: an interactive browser device flow, or a fully headless mode where your Kiro API key lives in AWS Secrets Manager and never appears in deploy state or shell history.
Experimental pack. Kiro CLI uses its own cloud inference — not Amazon Bedrock or bedrockify. Your prompts leave your AWS account and go to Kiro’s infrastructure. Auth shape may change as the upstream CLI evolves.
Kiro CLI does not use Bedrock. It connects to Kiro’s cloud inference. You need a Kiro account — get one at kiro.dev.

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What makes Kiro CLI different

  • AWS MCP servers pre-installed. The pack installs awslabs.terraform-mcp-server, awslabs.ecs-mcp-server, awslabs.eks-mcp-server, awslabs.core-mcp-server, and awslabs.aws-documentation-mcp-server using uv + uvenv.
  • Two auth modes. Interactive browser SSO (kiro-cli login --use-device-flow) or headless via a Secrets Manager secret (--kiro-from-secret). The raw key never appears in CloudFormation state, Terraform state, or UserData logs.
  • Headless one-shot mode. Once authenticated, run kiro-cli --no-interactive "prompt" for CI-style automation.
  • No Bedrock dependency. The pack installs with no bedrockify and no IAM Bedrock permissions required.

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Compatible profiles

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Prerequisites

  • AWS CLI configured with admin access in a dedicated sandbox account
  • A Kiro account — sign up at kiro.dev
  • For headless mode: an API key from app.kiro.dev stored in AWS Secrets Manager before deploy
  • No Bedrock access or Docker needed

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Install

Store your Kiro API key in Secrets Manager first, then pass the secret reference to the installer. The raw key never leaves Secrets Manager.
After deploy, KIRO_API_KEY is written to ~/.kiro/env (mode 0600) and sourced automatically on login. No interactive login step needed.

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Connect and use

Inside the TUI, use /model to switch models and /tools to list available MCP tools.

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Configuration options

The --kiro-from-secret flag is the only supported headless auth path through the top-level installer, CloudFormation, and Terraform. A legacy --kiro-api-key flag exists at the pack script level but is intentionally not threaded through the installer — passing secrets on the command line leaks them into shell history and /proc/<pid>/cmdline.

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How --kiro-from-secret works

When you pass --kiro-from-secret /lowkey/kiro-api-key, only the secret name flows through CloudFormation or Terraform state — never the raw key. At deploy time, the EC2 instance uses its IAM role to call aws secretsmanager get-secret-value and writes the resolved key to ~/.kiro/env with 0600 permissions. The key is sourced automatically on every login. The raw key is never stored in CloudFormation state, Terraform state, or shell history at any point in this flow.

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MCP servers

The five pre-installed MCP servers are available inside the Kiro TUI:
Add additional MCP servers after deploy:

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Resource requirements

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Notes and limitations

  • Kiro CLI is a pure CLI pack — no background service runs between sessions.
  • Model selection happens inside the CLI with /model, not at deploy time. The --model installer flag is ignored.
  • Your prompts and code leave your AWS account and go to Kiro’s infrastructure. Review Kiro’s data policy before use.
  • When you tear down the stack, ~/.kiro/env disappears with the EBS volume. Rotate the Secrets Manager value separately if the key is shared with other systems.
  • This pack is validated against Kiro CLI v2. The pack warns at install time if a v1 or v3+ binary is detected.