Meilisearch CLI

meili is the official command line tool for Meilisearch. It talks to any Meilisearch instance, local or remote, and to Meilisearch Cloud.

It is built for coding agents first: no prompts, structured output, stable errors and exit codes, and a meili schema command that describes the whole CLI in one call.

Status: work in progress. The command tree and contracts are defined in docs/, the implementation has not started yet. Nothing is published on npm for now.

Install

Once released, the package will be @meilisearch/cli on npm and the binary meili.

npm install -g @meilisearch/cli

Requires Node 22 or newer.

Quick start

export MEILI_URL=http://localhost:7700
export MEILI_API_KEY=masterKey

meili health
meili index create movies --primary-key id --wait
meili document add movies --file movies.json --wait
meili search movies "batman" --limit 5
meili settings update movies filterable-attributes --data '["genres"]' --wait

Every command prints JSON when stdout is not a terminal, and a table when it is. Force a mode with --output json|ndjson|table.

Command tree

meili health | version | stats
meili index      list | get | create | update | delete | swap | stats
meili document   list | get | add | update | delete | delete-all
meili search <index> [query]
meili multi-search | facet-search | similar
meili settings   get | update | reset
meili task       list | get | wait | cancel | delete
meili batch      list | get
meili key        list | get | create | update | delete
meili dump create | meili snapshot create
meili context    list | add | use | current | remove
meili cloud      login | logout | whoami | org | project | billing | region | plan
meili schema | docs | completions <shell>

The full list, with the API route behind each command, lives in docs/contract/commands.md.

Configuration

Connection settings resolve in this order: flags (--url, --api-key), environment variables (MEILI_URL, MEILI_API_KEY), then a named context from the config file.

Contexts let you switch between instances:

meili context add prod --url https://ms-abc123.fra.meilisearch.io --api-key ...
meili context use prod
meili context current

See docs/contract/config.md for every environment variable and the config file format.

Designed for agents

• Data goes to stdout, everything else goes to stderr.
• API responses are returned as they are, never wrapped.
• Errors are JSON objects with a stable code, and exit codes have fixed meanings (see docs/contract/output.md).
• No interactive prompt when stdin is not a TTY. Destructive commands need --yes.
• meili schema prints every command, argument and flag as JSON. meili docs prints a compact agent guide.

Documentation

• docs/contract/: what the CLI promises (commands, output, config)
• docs/adr/: why we decided what we decided
• CLAUDE.md: maintainer guide for humans and coding agents

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md, then CLAUDE.md. One command per pull request, and pnpm lint, pnpm typecheck, pnpm test must pass.

License

MIT