JSON output and scripting

The CLI is designed to be used by people at a terminal, but the same commands work just as well inside shell scripts, CI pipelines, and other automation. This page collects the flags that matter when you’re scripting.

Machine-readable output

A handful of commands can emit JSON instead of human-readable text. Use the global --output flag (-o for short):

dina apps list --output json
dina apps info --app my-app -o json
dina apps deployments --app my-app -o json
dina auth status -o json
dina users list -o json

The JSON shape is stable enough for scripts. If you need more commands to support JSON, tell us.

Commands that don’t expose a JSON form just emit plain text no matter what -o you pass.

Global flags for automation

These work on every command:

Flag	What it does
`--no-input`	Error out instead of waiting on a prompt. Use in scripts and CI.
`--quiet`, `-q`	Suppress informational messages on stderr. Results still go to stdout.
`--output`, `-o`	`text` (default) or `json`. JSON output is to stdout.
`--no-color`	Strip ANSI colour codes from output. Also honoured automatically when stdout isn’t a TTY, or when `NO_COLOR=1` is set.
`--debug`	Print verbose request/response output. Also triggered by `DEBUG=1`. Useful when something’s broken.

A CI-friendly deploy looks like:

dina deploy --app my-app --tag $IMAGE --wait --no-input --quiet

--wait makes the command exit non-zero if the deployment fails.
--no-input bails if any command somehow tries to prompt.
--quiet keeps CI logs tidy.

Exit codes

The CLI returns 0 on success and a non-zero code on error. Specifically:

Authentication or API errors → non-zero.
Validation errors (missing flags, bad values) → non-zero, with cobra printing usage.
Deploy with --wait that lands in a failure state → non-zero.

For one-off scripts, that’s usually enough. The error message itself is prefixed with error: on stderr, so it’s easy to grep out in logs.

Parsing output with `jq`

# Print just the URLs of your apps
dina apps list -o json | jq -r '.[].url'

# Get the ID of the most recent deployment
dina apps deployments --app my-app -o json | jq -r '.[0].id'

Signalling “not authenticated” in scripts

If a script only runs when you’re signed in, check authentication first:

if ! dina auth status -o json | jq -e '.authenticated' > /dev/null; then
  echo "Not signed in. Run: dina auth login"
  exit 1
fi

Keeping secrets out of shells

When passing secrets on the command line, be careful about shell history. A safer pattern is to read values from a file or environment variable in your CI, rather than inline:

dina apps env set --app my-app STRIPE_SECRET_KEY="$STRIPE_SECRET_KEY"

Most CI systems redact variable values from logs automatically — inline KEY=value literals usually aren’t redacted.