typesense-rest-cli

A full-coverage CLI for the Typesense search engine REST API. Every endpoint in Typesense's OpenAPI spec, exposed as a typed command. Generated from Typesense's official OpenAPI spec using openapi-cli-gen.

Why

Typesense has client libraries for most popular languages, but no REST CLI. For shell scripts, CI automation, index bootstrapping, and ad-hoc admin tasks, most people hand-roll curl with their API key in a header and hope they spelled the JSON right.

This CLI gives you the entire Typesense REST surface as typed shell commands — collections, documents, searches, aliases, keys, stopwords, analytics, conversations — no SDK, no boilerplate. When Typesense adds endpoints, a regeneration picks them up.

Install

pipx install typesense-rest-cli

# Or with uv
uv tool install typesense-rest-cli

Setup

Point it at your Typesense instance (default is http://localhost:8108):

export TYPESENSE_REST_CLI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8108

Authentication — important

Typesense uses an API key header (X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY), which this CLI maps to:

export TYPESENSE_REST_CLI_API_KEY=your-api-key

Note the env var name — it's _API_KEY, not _TOKEN. Typesense's spec uses an apiKey security scheme (not bearer), so the convention matches.

Quick Start

All commands below have been verified against a live Typesense instance.

# Server health
typesense-rest-cli health health

# Create a collection with a typed schema
typesense-rest-cli collections create \
  --name books \
  --fields '[
    {"name": "title",  "type": "string"},
    {"name": "author", "type": "string", "facet": true},
    {"name": "year",   "type": "int32"}
  ]' \
  --default-sorting-field year

# List all collections
typesense-rest-cli collections get-collections

# Get a specific collection's schema + doc count
typesense-rest-cli collections get-collection --collection-name books

# Index a document (use --root for the JSON body)
typesense-rest-cli documents index --collection-name books --root '{
  "id": "1",
  "title": "The Pragmatic Programmer",
  "author": "Hunt and Thomas",
  "year": 1999
}'

# Index another
typesense-rest-cli documents index --collection-name books --root '{
  "id": "2",
  "title": "Clean Code",
  "author": "Robert Martin",
  "year": 2008
}'

# Search — note that `q` is a single-char flag, so use -q (short form)
typesense-rest-cli documents search-collection \
  --collection-name books \
  -q code \
  --query-by title,author

# Delete the collection
typesense-rest-cli collections delete --collection-name books

The -q vs --q gotcha

Typesense's search endpoint uses a single-character query parameter q. Python's argparse treats single-character flags as short-form options, so you invoke it as -q code (one dash), not --q code. The --help output shows [-q str] — follow that.

Discover All Commands

# Top-level groups
typesense-rest-cli --help

# Commands in a group
typesense-rest-cli collections --help

# Flags for a specific command
typesense-rest-cli documents search-collection --help

documents search-collection exposes all ~70 search parameters as individual flags (--query-by, --filter-by, --sort-by, --facet-by, --include-fields, etc.).

Output Formats

Every command accepts --output-format:

typesense-rest-cli collections get-collections --output-format table
typesense-rest-cli collections get-collections --output-format yaml
typesense-rest-cli collections get-collections --output-format raw

Command Groups

Passing Complex JSON Bodies

Most documents write endpoints take raw documents whose schema is user-defined — the generator can't produce typed flags for them. Use --root with a JSON string:

typesense-rest-cli documents index --collection-name books --root '{"id":"1", ...}'
typesense-rest-cli documents update-document --collection-name books --document-id 1 --root '{"year":2024}'

Flat endpoints (like collections create) take typed flags directly.

How It Works

This package is a thin wrapper:

• Embeds the Typesense OpenAPI spec (spec.yaml)
• Delegates CLI generation to openapi-cli-gen at runtime
• Default base URL: http://localhost:8108

Since it's spec-driven, new Typesense endpoints show up automatically on regeneration.

License

MIT. Not affiliated with Typesense — this is an unofficial community CLI built on top of their public OpenAPI spec.