quilt-cli-0.33.0 is not a library.

quilt-cli

Version your data like code — on your own laptop. quilt gives the files your scripts and AI agents read and write real revisions: immutable, content-addressed, visible in status, and pushable to S3 when you want them shared. No server and no cloud credentials required to start.

Thin wrapper around quilt-rs — see docs/architecture.md for what each command does under the hood, and the repository README for positioning, and the Roadmap for what is missing and roughly when.

The binary is named quilt.

Install

Recommended (downloads a prebuilt binary):

cargo binstall quilt-cli

Prebuilt binaries are currently published for macOS (x86_64, aarch64) and Linux (x86_64-gnu). On other platforms, or if cargo-binstall is not installed, build from source:

cargo install quilt-cli

Commands

Command	Purpose
`browse`	Fetch and inspect a remote manifest
`create`	Create a new local-only package
`install`	Install a remote package locally
`status`	Show working-directory changes
`commit`	Commit a new package revision
`undo-commit`	Undo the newest commit, before the first push
`push`	Upload a local revision to the remote
`pull`	Fetch the latest remote revision
`list`	List installed packages and their commit status
`log`	List the revisions this copy has, newest first
`uninstall`	Remove a package from local tracking
`login`	Authenticate against a Quilt stack
`role`	Show or switch your active role on a stack

list's status compares commits: your last commit against the last-known remote tip, read from local records so listing stays offline. It is not the package's overall state — uncommitted edits are invisible to it, so a package with local changes still shows up_to_date. quilt status reads the working copy.

install fetches the package manifest and starts tracking it; files are downloaded only for the paths you name with --path (repeatable) or a &path= parameter in the URI.

pull reports the files it moved, in four groups: downloaded, left on the remote, updated, removed. A path you do not track is absent from all four — a pull writes nothing for it, so a copy that installed no paths reports no files at all. The message that follows is the newest revision's only: a pull advances to latest in one step and may span several revisions.

Run quilt <command> --help for arguments.

Global flags

--domain <path> — local domain directory (stores credentials and package metadata). Defaults to the platform local-data directory under com.quiltdata.quilt-sync/, shared with QuiltSync (~/.local/share/com.quiltdata.quilt-sync/ on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support/com.quiltdata.quilt-sync/ on macOS).
--home <path> — directory where packages keep their working files. Defaults to ~/QuiltSync on first use and is persisted in the domain lineage. Pass --home only to store packages somewhere else.

Every command accepts --json for a machine-readable form, before or after the subcommand, so quilt list --json | jq and quilt --json list | jq both work. Field names are stable; the human tables are not, so parse the JSON rather than the tables.

On any failure the command itself reports (argument errors come from the parser and stay human-readable, exit 2), the payload goes to stderr as {"error": {"kind": "...", "message": "..."}}, stdout stays empty, and the exit status is unchanged. kind is a stable identifier to branch on; message is the same prose the human form prints.

stderr is also the log stream, so the error object is not necessarily the whole of it: a warning at the default level, or INFO lines under -v, are written there first. The object is always a single line and always the last one, so read it with tail -n 1 rather than parsing the stream whole.

Commands keep stdout reserved for command output by default. Add -v or --verbose to show INFO-level logs on stderr; set RUST_LOG for target-specific filtering.

Example

quilt login --host open.quiltdata.com
quilt install \
    "quilt+s3://quilt-example#package=akarve/cord19&catalog=open.quiltdata.com"
quilt status --namespace akarve/cord19

Package files are stored under ~/QuiltSync by default. Pass --home only when you want a different package directory. The namespace defaults to the one in the URI, so install needs no --namespace here.

URIs follow the Quilt+ URI format. With &catalog=<host>, S3 requests use the stack credentials from quilt login; without it, the CLI uses your local AWS credentials from ~/.aws.

Fully local workflow

No login or remote is required to create, edit, and version a package entirely on disk:

quilt create --namespace me/local-pkg --message "Initial revision"

# Package files live under ~/QuiltSync/<namespace> by default; add/edit them directly
cd ~/QuiltSync/me/local-pkg
echo "a,b,c" > data.csv

quilt status
quilt commit --message "Add data.csv"

quilt list