Onyx CLI

A CLI for querying enterprise knowledge from Onyx. Includes an interactive chat TUI for humans and non-interactive commands for AI agents and scripts.

Installation

pip install onyx-cli

Or with uv:

uv pip install onyx-cli

Standalone binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows (amd64/arm64) are also attached to each cli/v* GitHub release.

Setup

Run the interactive chat TUI — on first launch it will guide you through setup:

onyx-cli chat

This prompts for your Onyx server URL and personal access token (PAT), tests the connection, and saves config to ~/.config/onyx-cli/config.json (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/onyx-cli/config.json if set). To reconfigure later, use the /configure command inside the TUI.

Environment variables override config file values:

Usage

Interactive chat

onyx-cli chat
onyx-cli chat --no-stream-markdown
onyx-cli chat --agent-name "Support Agent"

One-shot question

onyx-cli ask "What is our company's PTO policy?"
onyx-cli ask --agent-id 5 "Summarize this topic"
onyx-cli ask --agent-name "Support Agent" "hello"
onyx-cli ask --json "Hello"

List agents

onyx-cli agents
onyx-cli agents --json

Serve over SSH

# Start a public SSH endpoint for the CLI TUI
onyx-cli serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 2222

# Connect as a client
ssh your-host -p 2222

Clients can either:

• paste a personal access token (PAT) at the login prompt, or
• skip the prompt by sending ONYX_PAT over SSH:

export ONYX_PAT=your-pat
ssh -o SendEnv=ONYX_PAT your-host -p 2222

Useful hardening flags:

• --host-key (default ~/.config/onyx-cli/host_ed25519)
• --idle-timeout (default 15m)
• --max-session-timeout (default 8h)
• --rate-limit-per-minute (default 20)
• --rate-limit-burst (default 40)
• --rate-limit-cache (default 4096)

Commands

Global Flags

Agent / Non-Interactive Use

When called without a TTY (e.g., by an AI agent or piped into another command), onyx-cli adjusts its behavior:

• No subcommand: prints help and exits 0 (instead of launching the TUI)
• Results to stdout, progress/errors to stderr
• No ANSI codes or interactive prompts
• ask output truncated to 50000 bytes by default; full response saved to a temp file. Use --max-output 0 to disable.
• search stdout stays valid JSON: over the limit, whole results are dropped and a truncation object carries metadata plus the temp file path of the full response.

Configuration

If a human has already run onyx-cli chat (which includes first-time setup), the CLI works out of the box — no additional setup needed. Environment variables can override the config file or serve as an alternative when no config file exists:

export ONYX_SERVER_URL="https://your-onyx-server.com"
export ONYX_PAT="your-pat"

Exit Codes

Skill File

Install the bundled SKILL.md so AI coding agents can discover the CLI:

onyx-cli install-skill
onyx-cli install-skill --global
onyx-cli install-skill --copy
onyx-cli install-skill --agent claude-code

Slash Commands (in TUI)

Keyboard Shortcuts

Building from Source

Requires Go 1.24+.

cd cli
go build -o onyx-cli .

Development

# Run tests
go test ./...

# Build
go build -o onyx-cli .

# Lint
golangci-lint run ./...

Publishing to PyPI

The CLI is distributed as a Python package via PyPI. The build system uses hatchling with manygo to cross-compile Go binaries into platform-specific wheels.

CI release (recommended)

Tag a release and push — the release-cli.yml workflow builds wheels for all platforms and publishes to PyPI automatically:

tag --prefix cli

To do this manually:

git tag cli/v0.1.0
git push origin cli/v0.1.0

The workflow builds wheels for:

• linux/amd64 manylinux
• linux/amd64 musllinux
• linux/arm64 manylinux
• linux/arm64 musllinux
• darwin/amd64
• darwin/arm64
• windows/amd64
• windows/arm64

Manual release

Build a wheel locally with uv. Set GOOS and GOARCH to cross-compile for other platforms (Go handles this natively — no cross-compiler needed):

# Build for current platform
uv build --wheel

# Cross-compile for a different platform
GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 uv build --wheel

# Build a musllinux-tagged Linux wheel for Alpine/musl environments
GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 CGO_ENABLED=0 \
  ONYX_CLI_WHEEL_PLATFORM_TAG=musllinux_1_2_x86_64 \
  uv build --wheel

# Upload to PyPI
uv publish

Versioning

Versions are derived from git tags with the cli/ prefix (e.g. cli/v0.1.0). The tag is parsed by internal/_version.py and injected into the Go binary via -ldflags at build time.