If you spend most of your day living in a terminal, Proton just gave you a very on‑brand early holiday gift: Proton Pass now has its own command-line interface, bringing the company’s privacy-first password manager directly into shells, scripts, and CI/CD pipelines. It’s a move that pushes Proton Pass beyond “yet another password manager” and into the territory of a developer‑friendly secret management tool that can realistically sit alongside the likes of 1Password CLI, Bitwarden CLI, and dedicated secret stores.

At its core, Proton Pass CLI is exactly what it sounds like: a way to interact with your Proton Pass vaults and items entirely from the command line. Once it’s set up, you can list vaults, read and update entries, create new items, and even manage who has access to shared vaults, all without ever opening a browser or desktop app. The CLI speaks the same language as the rest of the Proton ecosystem — end‑to‑end encryption, zero‑knowledge design, and servers sitting under Swiss privacy law — but now exposes that through a developer‑friendly interface that’s scriptable and automation‑ready.

Proton is pretty explicit about who this is for: developers, DevOps engineers, sysadmins, and anyone running headless environments where a GUI is either clunky or impossible. If you’re deploying services via CI/CD, running workloads in containers, or managing machines over SSH, you can now pull secrets from Proton Pass directly into those workflows instead of juggling separate secret managers, config repos, and password tools. The CLI works in places where browser extensions and native apps simply don’t fit, which has been a long‑standing pain point for teams trying to standardize on a single password manager for both humans and machines.

Getting started is intentionally low‑friction. On macOS and Linux, you can install the Proton Pass CLI via a single curl | bash command that pulls an official installer script from Proton, while Windows users can grab a PowerShell script and run it locally.​ Under the hood, the tool talks to Proton using the company’s existing app‑password system, so you don’t have to mint long‑lived generic API tokens just to wire it into CI pipelines or remote servers.​ That’s nice from a security hygiene perspective: if a specific app password is compromised, you can revoke it without touching your primary account credentials.

Once installed, the CLI leans on a simple URI syntax to address secrets: think pass://vault/item/field. That syntax is more than just neat; it’s what makes the tool scriptable in a clean way. You can export a credential into an environment variable for a one‑off command, or bake those URIs directly into template files that the CLI will process and replace at runtime. That approach avoids hard‑coding credentials in config files or shell scripts, which is exactly where secrets love to leak into version control or logs.

Proton also clearly thought about SSH workflows, which is often where password managers fall short for developers. The CLI can act as an SSH agent itself or feed keys stored in Proton Pass into your existing SSH agent, meaning your SSH private keys can live in the same encrypted vaults as your passwords and other secrets. If you’re currently syncing SSH keys via dotfiles repos, cloud drives, or ad‑hoc key copies, centralizing them in Proton Pass with CLI‑level SSH integration is a meaningful upgrade.

In terms of capabilities, the CLI more or less mirrors what you’d expect from the Proton Pass GUI, but refocused around automation. You can create, read, update, and delete the usual suspects — passwords, secure notes, payment cards, identities, Wi‑Fi credentials, custom item types, and even SSH key entries — across any vault you have access to. Shared vaults are fully supported, including managing member access and permissions, which means onboarding or offboarding a developer from a project can be a single scripted operation instead of a round‑trip through an admin console.

The security story is obviously Proton’s home turf, and the CLI sticks to that playbook. Proton Pass as a whole uses end‑to‑end encryption with a zero‑knowledge model, so Proton can’t see your stored secrets, and that extends to anything you touch via the CLI. What’s more interesting in practice is how the tool handles secret injection: credentials can be passed into scripts, apps, and CI jobs without ever appearing in plaintext in shells, logs, or command history, which is where traditional “export VAR=value” patterns fall down. Combined with Proton’s broader protections — like breach monitoring and security policy controls on the business side — the CLI becomes another piece of an ecosystem that’s trying to reduce the number of ways your secrets can leak while still staying usable.

If you’re already a Proton Pass user, there’s a bit of a catch: the CLI isn’t available on the free tier. Proton is making it accessible to paying customers on Pass Plus, Pass Family, Pass Professional, and all Proton bundles, which puts it squarely in the “power user and business” column. That tracks with how most password managers treat advanced features like CLI access and enterprise‑grade sharing; Proton is clearly positioning this as an upsell for technical users and teams who want to standardize on Proton for both consumer and work use.

From a timing and strategy point of view, the launch lines up with Proton’s broader push to evolve from “encrypted email company” into a full privacy suite, with Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN, Pass, Wallet, and now collaboration tools like Docs and Sheets. Proton Pass itself has been steadily maturing — adding passkeys, more polished autofill, and Pass Monitor for security insights — to the point where independent reviewers have started calling it a legitimate competitor to incumbents rather than a sidecar feature for Proton Mail. Dropping a CLI into that mix gives Proton a better story for teams, developers, and businesses who need more than a browser extension and a mobile app.

Where this gets especially interesting is automation. For a typical team, you can imagine a workflow where application secrets, database credentials, and SSH keys all live in Proton Pass, while CI/CD jobs pull what they need at deploy time via the CLI. You cut down on bespoke secret‑management infrastructure, reduce context switching between tools, and still keep your secrets under end‑to‑end encryption with a vendor that’s built its brand around privacy rather than data monetization. Early community feedback in DevOps‑adjacent spaces is already circling around possible integrations with tools like External Secrets Operator, which hints at where Proton might go next with this.

For everyday power users, the value is more straightforward: if you live in tmux, vim, and zsh, being able to pull credentials, edit vault entries, or rotate passwords without leaving the terminal just feels right. Instead of fumbling with a mouse and window switching, you can wire common actions into shell aliases or small helper scripts, which is exactly the kind of quality‑of‑life upgrade that makes a tool feel like part of your workflow rather than an interruption. Proton has framed the CLI as a way to “reduce context switching” and “implement secure automation across local development, servers, and CI/CD environments,” and for once, that marketing line isn’t really exaggerating.

The bigger picture: Proton Pass CLI nudges password managers into a space that’s traditionally been dominated by DevOps‑centric secret stores, while still keeping the UX and ecosystem benefits of a consumer‑grade app. If Proton continues to iterate here — deeper integrations, more tooling around policies, maybe hooks into broader infrastructure stacks — this could become a legitimate alternative to running separate systems for human passwords and machine secrets. For now, if you’re already paying for Proton or have been looking for an excuse to move more of your security stack under one privacy‑focused roof, the Proton Pass CLI is a compelling, very developer‑friendly reason to take another look.