CLI

tip

If you’re not familiar with the CLI client, the Bitwarden Help Center has lots of great documentation that will help you get oriented.

Requirements

Before you start, you must complete the Clients repository setup instructions.

Build instructions

Nx commands are preferred.

We now recommend using Nx commands for building projects. For the cli:

# Build and watch (GPL)
npx nx serve cli --configuration=oss-dev
# Build and watch (Bitwarden)
npx nx serve cli --configuration=commercial-dev

For complete Nx documentation and all available commands, see Using Nx to Build Projects.

Build and run:

cd apps/cli
npm run build:oss:watch

By default, this will use the official Bitwarden servers. If you need to develop with Server running locally, follow the instructions below in Environment setup.

Environment setup

Configure Node to trust development certificates

A quick way to do this is to give Node access to your system certificates:

export NODE_USE_SYSTEM_CA=1

Alternatively, you can add the certificate directly to Node:

export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS=/path/to/your-certificate.pem

Target local Server instance

If you are running the Bitwarden Web application locally, you only need to set the base server location. The web application proxies API requests to your local Server APIs.

Run the following when you have Web running locally:

node build/bw.js config server https://localhost:8080

Otherwise, you need to set the individual Server API locations as follows:

node build/bw.js config server \
  --api http://localhost:4000 \
  --identity http://localhost:33656

Testing and Debugging

The build is located at build/bw.js. You can run this with node, for example:

node build/bw.js login

It may be more convenient to make the file executable first:

cd build
chmod +x bw.js
./bw.js login

To debug the CLI client, run it from a Javascript Debug Terminal and place the breakpoints in your Typescript code.