CLI reference

cdno is the command-line interface to a Cuaderno vault. This section documents every command. For the why behind them, see Concepts and Tutorials.

cdno [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Run cdno --help for the command list, or cdno <command> --help for any command’s flags.

Global options

These apply to every command:

Finding the vault

When --vault is not given, cdno discovers the vault by walking up from the current directory until it finds a .cuaderno/ folder. If that finds nothing, it falls back to the CUADERNO_VAULT_PATH environment variable. Standing inside a vault always wins over the env var. See Initialise a vault.

Interactive vs. scripted

Write commands follow one convention (the “flags-and-prompts” pattern):

• Interactive terminal, missing a required flag → cdno prompts for it, then asks you to confirm before writing.
• Non-interactive (piped, redirected, in CI, or --no-interactive) → a missing required flag is an error. Supply every flag and the command runs unattended.

This means the same command serves a human at a prompt and a script with no changes.

JSON output

--json makes any supported verb emit structured output:

• Read verbs (commitments, questions, status, orient, search, and the list/show verbs of project/portfolio/stewardship, plus action list) emit their listing or detail object.
• Write verbs (log, capture, file, track, and the create/update verbs of project, action, portfolio, stewardship, question, commit) emit a { "path": ..., "message": ... } result, and run non-interactively (so prompts can’t corrupt the JSON on a terminal).
• Maintenance / interactive / bootstrap commands (init, lint, reindex, normalise, triage, review, weekly, monthly) ignore --json.

The CLI’s JSON shapes match the MCP server DTOs. See JSON output for every shape.

The commands