Bitwarden Command-line Interface

The Bitwarden CLI is a powerful, full-featured command-line interface (CLI) tool to access and manage a Bitwarden vault. The CLI is written with TypeScript and Node.js and can be run on Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions.

Developer Documentation

Please refer to the CLI section of the Contributing Documentation for build instructions, recommended tooling, code style tips, and lots of other great information to get you started.

User Documentation

Download/Install

You can install the Bitwarden CLI multiple different ways:

NPM

If you already have the Node.js runtime installed on your system, you can install the CLI using NPM. NPM makes it easy to keep your installation updated and should be the preferred installation method if you are already using Node.js.

npm install -g @bitwarden/cli

Native Executable

We provide natively packaged versions of the CLI for each platform which have no requirements on installing the Node.js runtime. You can obtain these from the downloads section in the documentation.

Other Package Managers

• Chocolatey

  choco install bitwarden-cli
  

• Homebrew

  brew install bitwarden-cli
  

  ⚠️ The homebrew version is not recommended for all users.

  Homebrew pulls the CLI's GPL build and does not include device approval commands for Enterprise SSO customers.

• Snap

  sudo snap install bw
  

Help Command

The Bitwarden CLI is self-documented with --help content and examples for every command. You should start exploring the CLI by using the global --help option:

bw --help

This option will list all available commands that you can use with the CLI.

Additionally, you can run the --help option on a specific command to learn more about it:

bw list --help
bw create --help

Unlock with desktop biometrics

When bw unlock is run interactively without a password, the CLI first attempts to unlock through the Bitwarden desktop app. This requires Bitwarden Desktop 2026.9.0 or newer to be running, with biometric unlock enabled for the same account. If desktop biometric unlock is unavailable or is cancelled, the CLI falls back to the master password prompt.

Passing a password, --passwordenv, or --passwordfile skips the biometric attempt. Biometric unlock is also skipped when BW_NOINTERACTION=true.

The feature is gated behind the biometrics-sdk-ipc feature flag, which also gates the desktop side of the same IPC. While the flag is off the CLI never starts a desktop proxy.

If the desktop app is installed in a non-standard location, set BITWARDEN_DESKTOP_PROXY_PATH to the path of its desktop_proxy executable.

Help Center

We provide detailed documentation and examples for using the CLI in our help center at https://help.bitwarden.com/article/cli/.