I have successfully set up a kubernetes cluster on AWS using kops and the following commands:

$ kops create cluster --name=<my_cluster_name> --state=s3://<my-state-bucket> --zones=eu-west-1a --node-count=2 --node-size=t2.micro --master-size=t2.small --dns-zone=<my-cluster-dns>

$ kops update cluster <my-cluster-name> --yes

When accessing the dashboard, I am prompted to either enter a token or

Please select the kubeconfig file that you have created to configure access to the cluster.

When creating the cluster, ~/.kube/config was created that has the following form:

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: 
    <some_key_or_token_here>
    server: https://api.<my_cluster_url>
  name: <my_cluster_name>
contexts:
- context:
    cluster: <my_cluster_name>
    user: <my_cluster_name>
  name: <my_cluster_name>
current-context: <my_cluster_name>
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: <my_cluster_name>
  user:
    as-user-extra: {}
    client-certificate-data:
    <some_key_or_certificate>
    client-key-data:
    <some_key_or_certificate>
    password: <password>
    username: admin
- name:<my-cluster-url>-basic-auth
  user:
    as-user-extra: {}
    password: <password>
    username: admin

Why when pointing the kubernetes ui to the above file, I get

Authentication failed. Please try again.