⚠️ Temporal CLI's API is still a subject for changes. ⚠️

The Temporal CLI is a command-line interface for running Temporal Server and interacting with Workflows, Activities, Namespaces, and other parts of Temporal.

curl -sSf https://temporal.download/cli.sh | sh

brew install temporal

Download and extract the latest release from GitHub releases.

temporal server start-dev

At this point you should have a server running on localhost:7233 and a web interface at http://localhost:8233.

Run individual commands to interact with the local Temporal server.

temporal operator namespace list
temporal workflow list

Use the help flag to see all available options:

temporal server start-dev -h

Namespaces are pre-registered at startup so they're available to use right away.

By default, the "default" namespace is registered. To customize the pre-registered namespaces, start the server with:

temporal server start-dev --namespace foo --namespace bar

Registering namespaces the old-fashioned way via temporal operator namespace register foo works too!

By default temporal server start-dev run in an in-memory mode.

To persist the state to a file use --db-filename:

temporal server start-dev --db-filename my_test.db

By default the Temporal UI is started with Temporal CLI. The UI can be disabled via a runtime flag:

temporal server start-dev --headless

To build without static UI assets, use the headless build tag when running go build.

Some advanced uses require Temporal dynamic configuration values which are usually set via a dynamic configuration file inside the Temporal configuration file. Alternatively, dynamic configuration values can be set via --dynamic-config-value KEY=JSON_VALUE.

For example, to disable search attribute cache to make created search attributes available for use right away:

temporal server start-dev --dynamic-config-value system.forceSearchAttributesCacheRefreshOnRead=true

Running temporal completion SHELL will output the related completion SHELL code. See the following sections for more details for each specific shell / OS and how to enable it.

Add the following to your ~/.zshrc file:

source <(temporal completion zsh)

or from your terminal run:

echo 'source <(temporal completion zsh)' >> ~/.zshrc

Then run source ~/.zshrc.

Bash auto-completion relies on bash-completion. Make sure you follow the instruction here and install the software or use a package manager to install it like apt install bash-completion, pacman -S bash-completion or yum install bash-completion, etc. For example on alpine linux:

• apk update
• apk add bash-completion
• source /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh

Verify that bash-completion is installed by running type _init_completion add the following to your .bashrc file to enable completion for temporal

echo 'source <(temporal completion bash)' >>~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

For macos you can install it via brew brew install bash-completion@2 and add the following line to your ~/.bashrc:

[[ -r "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh" ]] && . "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh"

Verify that bash-completion is installed by running type _init_completion and add the following to your .bashrc file to enable completion for temporal

echo 'source <(temporal completion bash)' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

To compile the source run:

go build -o dist/temporal ./cmd/temporal

To compile the documentation, run:

go build -o dist/temporal-docgen ./cmd/temporal-docgen

To run all tests:

go test ./...

• When consuming Temporal as a library in go mod, you may want to replace grpc-gateway with a fork to address URL escaping issue in UI. See temporalio/temporalite-archived#118

• When running the executables from the Releases page in macOS you will want to allowlist temporal binary in Security & Privacy settings: