CLI overview

Most of BMAD+ happens in a conversation with your assistant. The bmad-plus command is the part that runs in a terminal: it installs the agents into a project, keeps them up to date, checks the installation, and gives the agents a few deterministic helpers (questionnaires, swarms, durable task runs, acceptance recipes, review evidence). This page is for anyone who types a command, whether by hand, in a script or in CI.

Running the command#

The package is published on npm as bmad-plus and needs Node.js 20 or newer. You run it through npx, which is part of npm. Three forms matter.

$ npx --no-install bmad-plus --version
0.23.0

The eighteen commands#

Options every command shares#

Commander, the argument parser BMAD+ uses, provides -V, --version and -h, --help on the program, and bmad-plus help <command> or bmad-plus <command> --help for any command. The other shared options are declared command by command, so this table shows exactly where each one exists.

• -d, --directory <path> points the command at a project folder. Without it, the current folder is used. The cases where the folder holds no installation are explained on each page.
• -y, --yes accepts the defaults and skips every prompt (see below).
• -l, --lang <code> picks the language of the installer screens (see below).
• --json prints a machine-readable result instead of text, so a script can parse it.

Installer languages#

The installer and uninstaller screens exist in ten languages. Every other command prints English.

• Interactive install without --lang: the first question is the language.
• install --yes without --lang: the screens are in English, and the communication language written to the configuration follows your system locale when it matches one of the ten, otherwise English.
• An unknown code is not an error: the screens fall back to English.
• uninstall and update without --lang use the language recorded at install time (uiLanguage in the manifest), then English.

Non-interactive use with --yes#

A script, a CI job or a pipe has no terminal to answer questions. install, uninstall and update refuse to start in that situation unless you pass --yes, instead of stopping halfway through a prompt. scan and autoconfig also accept --yes to take their recommended answers.

$ echo | npx bmad-plus install
This command requires a terminal. Run `npx bmad-plus install --yes` to proceed without prompts.
# Exit code 1; nothing was written.

npx bmad-plus install --packs core,design --tools claude-code --yes --lang fr

Exit codes#

Every command exits with 0 on success. An error that no command handles itself ends with the line BMAD+: <message> on the error stream and exit code 1. Beyond that, some commands use further codes to report a state a script can act on. After a command settles, BMAD+ releases the terminal input, so your shell prompt returns without Ctrl+C.