wagtail-cli

🚧 This is a prototype / early MVP. Feedback very welcome! See CMS with AI, not AI CMS: Wagtail 8.0’s new API for context.

A command-line client for the Wagtail v3 API. Install it, point it at a Wagtail site's API, and drive CMS operations (pages, images, documents, snippets, sites, locales, redirects, schema) from your terminal — handy for automation and AI-orchestrated content management. It can also put the Wagtail documentation in your terminal: wt docs releases/8.0 prints the release notes as Markdown.

Installation

Pick the command for your preferred package installer. The console script is wt (the package name is wagtail-cli):

uv tool install wagtail-cli      # permanent install; then run `wt …`
uvx --from wagtail-cli wt       # one-shot, no install

Quick start

export WAGTAIL_CLI_BASE_URL="https://cms.example.com/api/v3/"
export WAGTAIL_CLI_TOKEN="your-api-token"

wt api whoami        # verify authentication
wt api pages list    # browse pages
wt api schema list   # discover page types

Or run wt api init once to save these to ~/.wagtail-cli.toml interactively.

Reading the Wagtail docs needs no configuration at all:

wt docs releases/8.0    # release notes, as Markdown
wt docs api             # index of v3 API operations
wt docs search picture  # search the docs

Create and publish a blog page from a Markdown file:

wt api pages create blog.BlogPage --parent /blog/ \
  --title "Hello world" --field body:@post.md --publish

Rich-text fields accept Markdown via a .md file reference: the value is sent to the API as {"format": "db_markdown", "content": …}.

Command surface

• wt api … — all Wagtail v3 API operations (pages, images, documents, snippets, sites, locales, redirects, schema), plus wt api init and wt api whoami.
• wt start … — scaffold a new Django/Wagtail project (mirrors wagtail start / django-admin startproject; default custom base-page template).
• wt docs … — read docs.wagtail.org as Markdown: wt docs releases/8.0, wt docs api for the v3 API reference, wt docs search picture to search.
• Delegation — any other wt <command> is forwarded to ./manage.py (if present) or django-admin (when DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is set), so wt also fronts Django commands like wt runserver/wt makemigrations.
• wt --version / wt --help — custom, enhanced with detected Wagtail/Django versions and ./manage.py --help when available.

Documentation

• Quickstart — end-to-end walkthrough against the demo site.
• Configuration — config cascade, dotfiles, environment variables.
• Command reference — every command and flag.
• Development — layout, testing, and how to add commands.

Development

just install           # set up the environment
just test              # run the test suite
just lint              # lint with Ruff
just test-integration  # run integration tests against a live site

See the development guide for details.