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Command Line Interface (CLI)

Kùzu provides a CLI shell through which you can issue Cypher queries or CALL commands to query metadata. See the installation docs for instructions on how to install the CLI and the quick start page for its basic usage.

Start the shell

Navigate to the directory where the Kùzu CLI is located and run the following command:

Terminal window
./kuzu <db_path>

Where <db_path> is the directory for the database files. This path can point to an existing database or a yet-to-be-created directory, in which case Kùzu will automatically create the directory and initialize an empty database for you.

You can view the additional shell startup flags by running ./kuzu -h.

Terminal window
$ ./kuzu -h
help
  ./kuzu databasePath {OPTIONS}
    KuzuDB Shell


  OPTIONS:


      databasePath                      Database path.
      -h, --help                        Display this help menu
      -d, --defaultBPSize               Size of buffer pool for default and
                                        large page sizes in megabytes
      --nocompression                   Disable compression
      -r, --readOnly                    Open database at read-only mode.
      -p                                Path to directory for shell history
      -v, --version                     Display current database version
      "--" can be used to terminate flag options and force all following
      arguments to be treated as positional options

Shell commands

Once you start the shell, you can issue Cypher queries as shown in the get started section, or call any of the shell commands listed below.

:help

Show built-in command list within the Kùzu shell.

kuzu> :help
    :help     get command list
    :clear     clear shell
    :quit     exit from shell
    :max_rows [max_rows]     set maximum number of rows for display (default: 20)
    :max_width [max_width]     set maximum width in characters for display


    Note: you can change and see several system configurations, such as num-threads,
          timeout, and logging_level using Cypher CALL statements.
          e.g. CALL THREADS=5; or CALL current_setting('threads') return *;
          See: https://kuzudb.com/docusaurus/cypher/configuration

:clear

Clear shell. Alternatively, you can use Ctrl + L to clear the shell.

:quit

Exit from shell. Alternatively, you can use Ctrl + D to exit the shell.

:max_rows [max_rows]

Set maximum number of rows for display. 0 defaults to 20.

:max_width [max_width]

Set maximum width in characters for display. Defaults to terminal width if unable to display first and last columns.

Interrupt shell

To interrupt a running query, use Ctrl + C in CLI. Note: We currently don’t support interrupting COPY statement.

Non-interactive usage

To read and process a file in non-interactive mode, pipe the file content to the CLI.

Terminal window
./kuzu testdb < tinysnb/schema.cypher
---------------------------------------
| outputMsg                           |
---------------------------------------
| NodeTable: person has been created. |