Using the CLI

How to use Flower on the command-line.

Flower is designed to provide a friendly user experience from the command line. The CLI has commands for both viewing and building documentation from a Data Package’s metadata. The general pattern for how to use Flower from the CLI is:

Terminal

seedcase-flower COMMAND [ARGS] [OPTIONS]

To get started, try calling the program without any commands, arguments, or options by typing seedcase-flower and pressing enter. This is the same as invoking the --help flag and will show the following text:

Terminal

seedcase-flower

Viewing Data Package metadata

To view the metadata of a Data Package directly in the terminal, you can use the view command like so:

Terminal

seedcase-flower view

The view command displays the metadata in an easy to read format that is optimized for display directly in the Terminal.

Working with a Data Package in a custom location

By default, view looks for a datapackage.json file in the current directory, but you can specify a different path if desired:

Terminal

seedcase-flower view another/directory/datapackage.json

It also is possible to point Flower to a Data Package that is available online. To do this, you can provide the full URL to the remote datapackage.json, e.g.

Terminal

seedcase-flower view https://raw.githubusercontent.com/seedcase-project/example-seed-beetle/refs/heads/main/datapackage.json

For Data Packages on GitHub (like for the URL used above), you can use the gh: prefix as a shortcut. For example, the long URL above can be shortened to the following:

Terminal

seedcase-flower view gh:seedcase-project/example-seed-beetle

Styling the output

If you would like to customize the style of how the metadata is displayed, you can use the --style flag. This option allows you to format the output with any of the built-in styles:

Terminal

seedcase-flower view --style terminal-simple gh:seedcase-project/example-seed-beetle

Important

If you have set the style option in a configuration file read by Flower, you might be confused as to why it does not have an effect when calling seedcase-flower view --style .... The reason for this is that the view command by design completely ignores any configuration read from Flower’s configuration file, even those with the same name as the options passed to view. You can only configure view via command line flags.

For more details about what you can do with view, see seedcase-flower view --help.