openai-cli

README

OpenAI CLI

The official CLI for the OpenAI REST API.

Installation

Installing with Homebrew

brew install openai/tools/openai

Installing with Go

To test or install the CLI locally, you need Go version 1.25 or later installed.

go install 'github.com/openai/openai-cli/cmd/openai@latest'

Once you have run go install, the binary is placed in your Go bin directory:

• Default location: $HOME/go/bin (or $GOPATH/bin if GOPATH is set)
• Check your path: Run go env GOPATH to see the base directory

If commands aren't found after installation, add the Go bin directory to your PATH:

# Add to your shell profile (.zshrc, .bashrc, etc.)
export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"

Running Locally

After cloning the git repository for this project, you can use the scripts/run script to run the tool locally:

./scripts/run args...

Usage

The CLI follows a resource-based command structure:

openai [resource] <command> [flags...]

export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."

openai chat:completions create \
  --message '{content: Say this is a test, role: user}' \
  --model gpt-4o

For details about specific commands, use the --help flag.

Environment variables

Environment variable	Required	Default value
OPENAI_API_KEY	no	null
OPENAI_ADMIN_KEY	no	null
OPENAI_ORG_ID	no	null
OPENAI_PROJECT_ID	no	null
OPENAI_WEBHOOK_SECRET	no	null

Global flags

• --api-key (can also be set with OPENAI_API_KEY env var)
• --admin-api-key (can also be set with OPENAI_ADMIN_KEY env var)
• --organization (can also be set with OPENAI_ORG_ID env var)
• --project (can also be set with OPENAI_PROJECT_ID env var)
• --webhook-secret (can also be set with OPENAI_WEBHOOK_SECRET env var)
• --help - Show command line usage
• --debug - Enable debug logging. This includes HTTP request/response details and bodies; do not share debug logs if they may contain sensitive payloads.
• --version, -v - Show the CLI version
• --base-url - Use a custom API backend URL
• --format - Change the output format (auto, explore, json, jsonl, pretty, raw, yaml)
• --format-error - Change the output format for errors (auto, explore, json, jsonl, pretty, raw, yaml)
• --transform - Transform the data output using GJSON syntax
• --transform-error - Transform the error output using GJSON syntax

Passing files as arguments

To pass files to your API, you can use the @myfile.ext syntax:

openai <command> --arg @abe.jpg

Files can also be passed inside JSON or YAML blobs:

openai <command> --arg '{image: "@abe.jpg"}'
# Equivalent:
openai <command> <<YAML
arg:
  image: "@abe.jpg"
YAML

If you need to pass a string literal that begins with an @ sign, you can escape the @ sign to avoid accidentally passing a file.

openai <command> --username '\@abe'

Explicit encoding

For JSON endpoints, the CLI tool does filetype sniffing to determine whether the file contents should be sent as a string literal (for plain text files) or as a base64-encoded string literal (for binary files). If you need to explicitly send the file as either plain text or base64-encoded data, you can use @file://myfile.txt (for string encoding) or @data://myfile.dat (for base64-encoding). Note that absolute paths will begin with @file:// or @data://, followed by a third / (for example, @file:///tmp/file.txt).

openai <command> --arg @data://file.txt

Linking different Go SDK versions

You can link the CLI against a different version of the OpenAI Go SDK for development purposes using the ./scripts/link script.

To link to a specific version from a repository (version can be a branch, git tag, or commit hash):

./scripts/link github.com/org/repo@version

To link to a local copy of the SDK:

./scripts/link ../path/to/openai-go

If you run the link script without any arguments, it will default to ../openai-go.

License

Copyright 2026 OpenAI

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.