DX CLI
Use the dx CLI to manage your organization's Software Catalog, Scorecards, and Engineering data from the command line. All commands communicate with the DX web API and require authentication.
Getting Help
Run dx --help to see all top-level commands. Run dx <subcommand> --help to see usage for any command:
dx --help
dx auth --help
dx catalog --help
dx catalog entities --help
dx catalog entityTypes --help
dx scorecards --help
dx studio --helpAll commands accept --json to return machine-readable JSON instead of human-readable output.
Authentication
Before using a dx subcommand for the first time, verify that you are authenticated:
dx auth statusIf this returns an error or shows that you are not logged in, stop and ask the user to login interactively with dx init, or non-interactively with dx auth login.
Glossary
Software Catalog terms
Entity — A record in the Software Catalog representing a service, team, library, or any other thing tracked by your organization. Each entity has an identifier (a unique slug), a type, optional name, description, owner_teams, owner_users, and a map of typed properties.
Entity Type — The schema for a category of entities (e.g. service, library). An entity type defines which properties and aliases entities of that type carry.
Property — A typed field defined on an entity type. Properties have identifiers and types such as text, number, boolean, select, multi_select, url, date, user, list, json, and others. When setting properties with --property, use key=value syntax; for multi_select and list types, values are comma-separated.
Alias — An alternative identifier that maps external system references (e.g. a GitHub repo slug) to an entity.
Scorecards terms
Scorecard — A health-tracking framework that evaluates entities against a set of checks. Scorecards are either LEVEL-based (entities are ranked across named levels like Bronze/Silver/Gold) or POINTS-based (entities accumulate points from checks). To see how a specific entity is currently performing across all scorecards, use dx catalog entities scorecards <identifier>.
Check — A single SQL-based rule inside a scorecard. The SQL query returns a status column (PASS, WARN, or FAIL) for each entity.
Initiative — A time-boxed project that groups failing scorecard checks into actionable tasks for teams. Tasks for a given entity can be fetched with dx catalog entities tasks <identifier>.
Reference Docs
- Catalog management — Entities and entity types: listing, inspecting, creating, updating, and deleting.
- Scorecards management — Scorecards and checks: listing, inspecting, creating, updating, and deleting via YAML.