vibecli

README

vibecli

A minimal browser terminal for the Kiro CLI — kiro-cli in a tab, nothing more.

What it is

Vibecli is a single Go binary that serves a static web UI and brokers a PTY for one kiro-cli process per session. Unlike its sister app vibekit, there is no ACP bridge, no chat protocol, and no chat-history persistence — the browser drives kiro-cli's own TUI directly through the terminal stream, the same as an SSH session. Terminal state lives only in the server's in-memory VT buffer and is replayed to the browser on reconnect.

The terminal engine (VT500 screen buffer + WebSocket PTY handler on the server, renderer/keyboard/mouse/wire-decoder in the browser) is the shared @cplieger/web-terminal-engine library; vibecli adds only its own predictive echo, IME handling, and viewport/status UI.

Features

• Raw kiro-cli TUI in the browser — full terminal UI, reconnect with screen + scrollback replay (survives sleep/network blips).
• Persistent state on a single /config bind mount: kiro-cli auth/tokens, tools, and settings.
• Pinned kiro-cli — version + sha256 are Renovate-tracked in entrypoint.sh; bumps land via image rebuild (auto-update disabled for reproducibility).

Run it

# compose.yaml
services:
  vibecli:
    image: ghcr.io/cplieger/vibecli:latest
    user: "1000:1000"  # match your host user
    ports:
      - "9848:9848"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config        # kiro-cli auth/state, tools
      - ./workspace:/workspace  # your repos
    restart: unless-stopped

Before the first start, create and own the config directory, since the container runs as user: "1000:1000". The entrypoint does not chown it, so a root-owned host directory makes first boot fail with failed to create config directories:

mkdir -p /opt/appdata/vibecli
chown -R 1000:1000 /opt/appdata/vibecli

To skip managing host ownership, run as root instead with user: "0:0" (less secure).

kiro-cli is downloaded and pinned on first boot (it is not redistributed in the image, per the AWS Customer Agreement). Open http://localhost:9848, authenticate kiro-cli, and you have a terminal.

Security

Network-exposed: put it behind an authenticating reverse proxy — a browser tab here is a shell with filesystem access to /workspace. Observability is slog-only (structured access log; no metrics endpoint). Debian base (a shell + the kiro-cli subprocess are required). Images are published with cosign signatures and SBOM attestations.

License

GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.

Documentation

Overview

Package main is vibecli — a browser terminal wrapped around kiro-cli. Each /ws connection exec's `kiro-cli chat` directly in a PTY. Server-side state lives in vibecli's own VT screen (internal/vt): on reconnect, the current cell snapshot is replayed to the client. No external multiplexer.