CLI Configurations

The Aptible CLI provides configuration options such as MFA support, customizing output format, and overriding configuration location.

MFA support

To use hardware-based MFA (e.g., Yubikey) on Windows and Linux, manually install the libfido2 command line tools. You can find the latest installation release and installation instructions here.

For OSX users, installation via Homebrew will automatically include the libfido2 dependency.

Output Format

The Aptible CLI supports two output formats: plain text and JSON. You can select your preferred output format by setting the APTIBLE_OUTPUT_FORMAT environment variable to text or json.

If the APTIBLE_OUTPUT_FORMAT variable is left unset (i.e., the default), the CLI will provide output as plain text.

📘 The Aptible CLI sends logging output to stderr, and everything else to stdout (this is the standard behavior for well-behaved UNIX programs).

If you're calling the Aptible CLI from another program, make sure you don't merge the two streams (if you did, you'd have to filter out the logging output).

Note that if you're simply using a shell such as Bash, the pipe operator (i.e. |) only pipes stdout through, which is exactly what you want here.

Configuration location

The Aptible CLI normally stores its configuration (your Aptible authentication token and automatically generated SSH keys) in a hidden subfolder of your home directory: ~/.aptible. To override this default location, you can specify a custom path by using the environment variable APTIBLE_CONFIG_PATH. Since the files in this path grant access to your Aptible account, protect them as if they were your password itself!