CLI

Command-line interface for Electric Cloud — manage workspaces, projects, environments, and services from the terminal. The CLI provides full control over your Electric Cloud resources, from provisioning Postgres sync services and durable streams to managing per-PR environments in CI/CD pipelines. All commands support JSON output for scripting and automation.

Installation

Install globally:

npm install -g @electric-sql/cli

Or run directly with npx:

npx @electric-sql/cli --help

Authentication

The CLI checks for credentials in this order:

1. Browser login

For interactive use, log in via OAuth:

electric auth login

This opens the Electric Cloud dashboard in your browser. After authenticating, your session is stored locally at ~/.config/electric/auth.json and is valid for 7 days.

2. ELECTRIC_API_TOKEN environment variable

Set a token in your environment for CI/CD pipelines:

export ELECTRIC_API_TOKEN=sv_live_...
electric projects list

3. --token flag

Pass a token directly for one-off commands or scripts:

electric projects list --token sv_live_...

Provision a Postgres sync service

electric projects create --name "my-app"
electric environments create --project proj_abc --name "staging"
electric services create postgres \
  --environment env_abc \
  --database-url "postgresql://user:pass@host:5432/db" \
  --region us-east-1

Provision a durable streams service

electric services create streams \
  --environment env_abc \
  --region us-east-1

Fetch service credentials

electric services get-secret svc_abc

Per-PR environments

# Create an environment for the PR
ENV_ID=$(electric environments create \
  --project "$PROJECT_ID" --name "pr-$PR_NUMBER" \
  --json | jq -r '.id')

electric services create postgres \
  --environment "$ENV_ID" \
  --database-url "$DATABASE_URL" \
  --region us-east-1

# Tear down when the PR is closed
electric environments delete "$ENV_ID" --force

Environment variables

Variable	Description
ELECTRIC_API_TOKEN	API token for authentication
ELECTRIC_WORKSPACE_ID	Default workspace ID
ELECTRIC_API_URL	Override API base URL

JSON output

All commands support --json for machine-readable output:

electric projects list --json

Destructive commands (delete, revoke) require --force when using --json since there is no interactive prompt.