Use the CLI

The Northflank CLI client allows you to interact with Northflank via the command line.

The CLI client can be installed using either NPM or Yarn:

• npm i -g @northflank/cli, or
• yarn global add @northflank/cli

Once installed, authenticate yourself using the northflank login command. You will need to create an API token in your account/team settings in the Northflank application . If you are a member of a team an API token template must have been created by a member with permissions.

The CLI client is fully interactive, meaning that it will ask for any parameters needed along the way. However, you always have the option to pass in any required parameters in your commands. For example, after entering the command northflank get service details you will be prompted to enter a project ID and a service ID. You can achieve the same result in a single step by using the command northflank get service details --project <PROJECT_ID> --service <SERVICE_ID> .

Contexts allow you to separate different Northflank accounts and preferences when using the CLI client.

For example, you may have a context for your personal Northflank account, and a different context for a team account.

Contexts are created with the northflank login command. A browser window will open where you can select an API token from your Northflank account or team. Select one, or create a new token, and check it was successfully created in your terminal. You can enter Y to view the URL to open the login link manually in your browser.

See northflank login --help for the full list of options, including -n to name your context, and -t to manually provide a Northflank API token. Once logged in, the active context will be switched automatically.

Team members can generate an API token in that team's settings, provided an API role has been created by a member with permissions.

Once created, contexts can be viewed with northflank context ls and switched to with northflank context use, where you can choose from a list of available contexts.

To set a default project or service within a context, you can use the command northflank context use project|service|job to choose from an available list (or -i to specify manually by internal ID) and you will no longer need to supply a project/service/job for the set resources in the context in your commands.

If you need to run Northflank CLI commands with sudo, you may encounter environment and path resolution issues.

Common issues

• Environment variable preservation: The env_reset directive in sudo configuration prevents sudo -E from preserving your entire environment. You need to explicitly preserve required variables.

• Path resolution: sudo does not resolve paths the same way your shell does, which can prevent the CLI from being found.

Solution

Use --preserve-env to explicitly preserve environment variables and wrap the command in bash -c:

sudo --preserve-env=PATH,HOME bash -c 'northflank forward service --projectId <project-id> --serviceId <service-id>'

This ensures:

• PATH is preserved so sudo can find the northflank command
• HOME is preserved so the CLI can access your authentication contexts
• The command is resolved correctly through bash -c

Replace <project-id> and <service-id> with your actual project and service IDs.

When creating resources on Northflank, you can do so interactively, or you can supply a resource definition. This can be done using the --input or -i option followed by a JSON/YAML string, or by using the --file or -f option followed by the path to a JSON/YAML file containing the definition.

The resource definitions are equivalent to the API request bodies you will find in this documentation.

You can get help at any time by using the --help flag. This includes getting help with specific commands, for example northflank create project --help will return helpful information about creating a project.

To see a handy tree view of all possible commands, you can run northflank command-overview.