Org agenda from the command line

[mbrgm]

I was trying to get my org agenda from the command line using emacs -l ~/.emacs.d/init.el -eval '(org-batch-agenda "a")', but all I got was an empty agenda... I suspect this has to do with the async start, but I'm not sure about that. is there something to pay attention to when trying to run cli commands in combination with spacemacs?

[duerrp]

Your command works for me. Do you have org-agenda-files set?

[mbrgm]

Here's what I have in my .spacemacs:

(defun dotspacemacs/user-config ()
...
  (setq org-agenda-files (quote ("~/.deft/")))
...
)

When I include the setq with the command line call to org-batch-agenda, it works fine, i.e. /usr/local/bin/emacs -q --batch --eval '(progn (setq org-agenda-files (quote ("~/.deft/"))) (org-batch-agenda "a"))' 2> /dev/null -- but why is the .spacemacs config not being used?

[halvorlu]

It seems that dotspacemacs/user-config is called by emacs-startup-hook (see core/core-spacemacs.el). This hook is not called when running emacs in batch mode, see e.g. here. You can run the hook explicitly,

emacs -l ~/.emacs.d/init.el --eval "(run-hooks 'emacs-startup-hook)" --eval '(org-batch-agenda "a")'

This seems to work for me at least.

[concretevitamin]

@halvorlu It doesn't seem to work for me:

~ » emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs.d/init.el -eval '(org-batch-agenda "a" org-agenda-span 7)'                                                                                                                 255 ↵

Loading /Users/me/.emacs.d/core/core-versions.el (source)...
Loading /Users/me/.emacs.d/core/core-load-paths.el (source)...
Symbol's value as variable is void: user-emacs-directory

[halvorlu]

Did you try to run the emacs-startup-hook by including --eval "(run-hooks 'emacs-startup-hook)"?

[concretevitamin]

@halvorlu Yes. Using /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs, which is 25+, solved the issue for me.

[ghost]

@halvorlu What about org-agenda-batch-csv? I tried

#!/bin/bash
emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs.d/init.el --eval "(run-hooks 'emacs-startup-hook)" --eval '(org-batch-agenda-csv "a")' # 2> /dev/null

but it won't return anything. If I try the same function in emacs scratch buffer and use eval-buffer I only get the agenda but no csv.

[halvorlu]

I haven't tried org-batch-agenda-csv, so I'm not sure what could be the cause...

[mbrgm]

I switched to plain Emacs from Spacemacs in the meantime, so this is "resolved" for me.