A Rust CLI for interacting with the Bitwarden Secrets Manager. This is a beta release and might be missing some functionality.

We offer three ways to install bws:

Download bws via cargo from crates.io:

cargo install bws --locked

Linux/macOS: curl https://bws.bitwarden.com/install | sh

Windows: iwr https://bws.bitwarden.com/install | iex

An optional -u/--uninstall flag can be passed to the POSIX script to uninstall the CLI. The PowerShell version accepts an equivalent -Uninstall flag. The uninstallation process will remove the bws binary and the configuration directory (~/.bws).

Download a pre-built binary from the Releases page.

bws --help

If completion is not enabled already, you need to enable it first:

echo "autoload -U compinit; compinit" >> ~/.zshrc

Enable autocompletions for the current user:

echo 'source <(/path/to/bws completions zsh)' >> ~/.zshrc

Enable autocompletions for the current user:

echo 'source <(/path/to/bws completions bash)' >> ~/.bashrc

For more detailed documentation, please refer to the Secrets Manager CLI help article.

We also provide a docker image preloaded with the bws cli.

# From the root of the repository
docker build -f crates/bws/Dockerfile -t bitwarden/bws .

docker run --rm -it bitwarden/bws --help

To use a configuration file, utilize docker bind mounting to expose it to the container:

docker run --rm -it -v "$HOME"/.bws:/home/app/.bws bitwarden/bws --help

The manpages get built during compilation of the bws crate through the use of a build script. The output path of this build script can be located as follows:

MANPAGES_DIR=$(cargo build -p bws --message-format json | jq -r --slurp '.[] | select (.reason == "build-script-executed") | select(.package_id|contains("crates/bws")) .out_dir')

After running the provided commands, the built manpages should be located in $MANPAGES_DIR/manpages