The confab CLI is built on Cobra. Run confab --help or confab <command> --help at any time for the canonical, locally-installed reference. This page is organized by what you’d actually use each command for.
| Command | What it does |
|---|
confab setup --backend-url <url> | One-command onboarding: auth + install hooks + install bundled skills for every detected provider. See Overview. |
confab status | Print backend auth state and per-provider hook/skill status. Detects orphan hooks (hook installed but the provider CLI isn’t on PATH). |
confab login --backend-url <url> | Just the auth step (device-code flow, or --api-key to skip). |
confab logout | Clear stored credentials. |
confab update | Check for and install a newer CLI release. |
confab autoupdate enable|disable | Toggle automatic update checks. |
confab version | Print version, build info, and config dir path. |
Hooks are the bridge between your provider CLI (Claude Code, Codex) and the sync daemon. confab setup installs them automatically; these commands are for manual repair.
| Command | What it does |
|---|
confab hooks add --provider <name> | Install Confabulous hooks into the provider CLI’s config. |
confab hooks remove --provider <name> | Remove Confabulous hooks from the provider CLI’s config. |
The individual confab hook session-start / session-end / pre-tool-use / post-tool-use / user-prompt-submit subcommands are invoked by the provider CLI, not by you directly. They read JSON from stdin and write JSON to stdout — running them by hand isn’t useful.
| Command | What it does |
|---|
confab skills add | Install the bundled /til and /retro skills for detected providers (also done automatically by confab setup). |
confab skills remove | Remove the bundled skills. |
See Skills for what /til and /retro actually do.
The sync daemon is the long-running process that streams transcript chunks to the backend. You usually don’t touch it — it spawns and exits with each session. These commands are for troubleshooting.
| Command | What it does |
|---|
confab sync status | Show which sync daemons are running, per-session. |
confab sync start | Start a daemon for the current session (rarely needed — hooks do this). |
confab sync stop | Stop the daemon for the current session. |
| Command | What it does |
|---|
confab list | List local sessions discovered on disk (Claude Code and Codex). Supports duration and provider filters. |
confab save <session-id> [--provider X] | Manually upload a specific session by its provider-internal ID. Useful for backfilling sessions that ran before hooks were installed. For Codex, save performs the same tree walk-up as the hook, so passing any subagent UUID syncs the whole tree. |
confab session get-summary <id> | Fetch a condensed transcript for an uploaded session from the backend. |
confab session download <id> | Download the raw JSONL transcript files for an uploaded session. |
confab session list-files <id> | List transcript-file metadata for an uploaded session. |
| Command | What it does |
|---|
confab til --session <id> --title <t> --summary <s> | Save a TIL (“Today I Learned”) to the backend. Normally invoked by the /til skill; see Skills. |
confab retro <session-id> [--output-dir <dir>] | Fetch the condensed transcript plus structured metadata for retrospective analysis. Normally invoked by the /retro skill. |
| Command | What it does |
|---|
confab install | Copy the running confab binary into ~/.local/bin/ (manual alternative to the install script). |
confab redaction-test <file> | Test your current redaction rules against a sample transcript file before they affect real uploads. |
confab announce | Internal — used by the auto-update flow to surface release-notes messages. |
--backend-url — passed to commands that hit the backend (setup, login, save, til, retro, session ...). When omitted, the CLI uses the URL stored in ~/.confab/config.json from the last setup / login.--api-key — bypass the device-login flow for setup / login.--provider <claude-code|codex> — disambiguate which provider a command targets. Defaults vary per command; confab list, save, and til route through the provider interface so adding a new provider doesn’t require changes here.