Skip to main content

Restate CLI

You can use the CLI to interact with Restate, and manage your services, deployments and invocations.

Installing the CLI

Have a look at the CLI installation docs.

tip

The CLI can be a useful tool for debugging and troubleshooting. Have a look at the introspection page for a list of useful commands .

There are 2 ways to configure the CLI: via environment variables or via a configuration file.

Using environment variables

You can specify the following environment variables:

  • RESTATE_HOST: The hostname/IP address of the server. Default is localhost.
  • RESTATE_HOST_SCHEME: Default is http.
  • RESTATE_ADMIN_URL: To specify the full URL of the admin server (scheme+host+port).
  • RESTATE_AUTH_TOKEN: Set if authentication is required.

For example, to specify the hostname myhost and the host scheme https, pass environment variables as follows:

RESTATE_HOST=myhost RESTATE_HOST_SCHEME=https restate <command>
All CLI configuration variables

You can find the full list of configuration variables in the CLI GitHub repo.

You can also specify the configuration in a .env file. The CLI will look for a .env file in its current directory.

For example, to connect to a Restate admin server running at http://myhost:9070, save the following in a .env file:

.env
RESTATE_ADMIN_URL=http://myhost:9070

Using the config file

By default, the CLI will treat $HOME/.config/restate as its config directory. This is configurable with $RESTATE_CLI_CONFIG_HOME. Restate will look for file named config.toml inside this directory. You can edit this file with restate config edit, or view its contents with restate config view.

The config file has a native concept of 'enviroments' which are sets of configuration intended to specify different instances of Restate. You can list your configured environments:

> restate config list-environments

CURRENT  NAME   ADMIN_BASE_URL

*        local  http://localhost:9070/

By default, the CLI uses the local environment which is configured to point at a Restate instance running on your local machine. Additional environments can be specified as new blocks in config.toml:

config.toml
[myhost]

ingress_base_url = "http://myhost:8080"

admin_base_url = "http://myhost:9070"

bearer_token = "..."

The title of the block is the name of the environment. You can switch between environments in various ways:

  1. With an argument: restate -e myhost whoami
  2. With an environment variable: RESTATE_ENVIRONMENT=myhost restate whoami
  3. With the command restate config use-environment myhost. This will write the name of the environment to the CLI config directory, so that it's used by default for all CLI commands. You can switch back to local with restate config use-environment local.