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.

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
  

• Snap

  sudo snap install bw
  

Documentation

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

Detailed Documentation

We provide detailed documentation and examples for using the CLI in our help center at https://help.bitwarden.com/article/cli/.

Build/Run

Requirements

• Node.js v16.13.1.
  • Testing is done against Node 16, other versions may work, but are not guaranteed.
• NPM v8

Run the app

npm install
npm run sub:init # initialize the git submodule for jslib
npm run build:watch

You can then run commands from the ./build folder:

node ./build/bw.js login

Contribute

Code contributions are welcome! Please commit any pull requests against the master branch. Learn more about how to contribute by reading the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Security audits and feedback are welcome. Please open an issue or email us privately if the report is sensitive in nature. You can read our security policy in the SECURITY.md file.

Prettier

We recently migrated to using Prettier as code formatter. All previous branches will need to updated to avoid large merge conflicts using the following steps:

1. Check out your local Branch
2. Run git merge ec53a16c005e0dd9aef6845c18811e8b14067168
3. Resolve any merge conflicts, commit.
4. Run npm run prettier
5. Commit
6. Run git merge -Xours 910b4a24e649f21acbf4da5b2d422b121d514bd5
7. Push

Git blame

We also recommend that you configure git to ignore the prettier revision using:

git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs