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Bitwarden Command-line Interface
The Bitwarden CLI is a powerful, full-featured command-line interface (CLI) tool to access and manage a Bitwarden vault. The CLI is written with TypeScript and Node.js and can be run on Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions.
Developer Documentation
Please refer to the CLI section of the Contributing Documentation for build instructions, recommended tooling, code style tips, and lots of other great information to get you started.
User Documentation
Download/Install
You can install the Bitwarden CLI multiple different ways:
NPM
If you already have the Node.js runtime installed on your system, you can install the CLI using NPM. NPM makes it easy to keep your installation updated and should be the preferred installation method if you are already using Node.js.
npm install -g @bitwarden/cli
Native Executable
We provide natively packaged versions of the CLI for each platform which have no requirements on installing the Node.js runtime. You can obtain these from the downloads section in the documentation.
Other Package Managers
- Chocolatey
choco install bitwarden-cli - Homebrew
brew install bitwarden-cli⚠️ The homebrew version is not recommended for all users.
Homebrew pulls the CLI's GPL build and does not include device approval commands for Enterprise SSO customers.
- Snap
sudo snap install bw
Help Command
The Bitwarden CLI is self-documented with --help content and examples for every command. You should start exploring the CLI by using the global --help option:
bw --help
This option will list all available commands that you can use with the CLI.
Additionally, you can run the --help option on a specific command to learn more about it:
bw list --help
bw create --help
Help Center
We provide detailed documentation and examples for using the CLI in our help center at https://help.bitwarden.com/article/cli/.