Scripting & Automation

The CLI is built for both interactive use and automation. Three flags control output behavior across all commands.

JSON output

Every command that prints a table also supports JSON:

ancla workspaces list --json

[
  {
    "name": "My Workspace",
    "slug": "my-ws",
    "member_count": 3,
    "project_count": 2
  }
]

The long form works too:

ancla workspaces list --output json

Pipe JSON into jq for extraction:

ancla services list my-ws/my-project/production --json | jq '.[].slug'

Quiet mode

Suppress spinners, progress messages, and confirmations:

ancla services deploy my-ws/my-project/production/my-service --quiet

Short form:

ancla services deploy my-ws/my-project/production/my-service -q

In quiet mode, the CLI prints only essential output: IDs, final status, and errors. Combine with --json for fully machine-parseable output:

ancla services deploy my-ws/my-project/production/my-service -q --json

Following long-running operations

Build and deploy commands accept --follow (or -f) to stream output until the operation completes:

ancla services deploy my-ws/my-project/production/my-service --follow
ancla builds create my-ws/my-project/production/my-service --follow
ancla deploys log <deploy-id> --follow
ancla logs -f

Without --follow, these commands print the current state and exit.

Skipping confirmation prompts

Destructive commands (down, cache flush, config delete) prompt for confirmation in interactive use. Skip the prompt with --yes:

ancla down --yes
ancla cache flush --yes

CI/CD example

A GitHub Actions step that deploys and waits for completion:

- name: Deploy to Ancla
  env:
    ANCLA_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.ANCLA_API_KEY }}
  run: |
    ancla services deploy my-ws/my-project/production/my-service --follow --quiet

The ANCLA_API_KEY env var is picked up automatically. No config file or login step needed.

Exit codes

The CLI exits with code 0 on success and non-zero on failure. Deploy failures, auth errors, and invalid arguments all produce non-zero exits, so set -e in shell scripts works as expected.