Command Line Interface (CLI)

Last Updated: Jan 13, 2021

This page provides information about the Globus CLI, a standalone application that can be installed on the user’s machine and used to access the Globus service.

The CLI provides an interface to Globus services from the shell, and is suited to both interactive and simple scripting use cases.

It is open source and available at https://github.com/globus/globus-cli

Installation

The Globus CLI is available as a python package from PyPI. It can be installed with pipx or pip.

We enthusiastically recommend using pipx to install the Globus CLI. It provides an isolated environment to keep your CLI installation running smoothly, and it’s resilient to changes in your system’s python installation.

pipx
pip

pipx install globus-cli

After that, you can use pipx to manage your installation.

Some time later, upgrade your installed version:

pipx upgrade globus-cli

Reinstall the entire CLI in the event something about your python has changed:

pipx reinstall globus-cli

pip install globus-cli

This is supported anywhere that pip works. For example, in an activated virtualenv.

Note

We recommend against installing with pip install --user or sudo pip install. There are known issues with these installation methods.

Setting Up Tab Completion

The Globus CLI provides a shell completer for tab completion, supporting both the zsh and bash shells. To setup completion, you must run a shell function provided by the globus command.

The following snippets are suitable for inclusion in a .bashrc or .zshrc, to setup completion whenever a shell starts and the Globus CLI is installed:

if type globus > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    eval "$(globus --bash-completer)"
fi

Note

The completer requires Bash version 4.4 or newer. If you are using an older version of Bash, you may have success writing the completer to a file and editing it, e.g.

globus --bash-completer | sed 's/nosort/nospace/' > ~/.globus_bash_completion.sh

and then sourcing it in your .bashrc.

if type globus > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    eval "$(globus --zsh-completer)"
fi

The --completer flag can be used in either bash or zsh. It will detect your current shell from the SHELL environment variable. You can use it if you use multiple shells and want to share config:

if type globus > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    eval "$(globus --completer)"
fi

If you are wary of putting a subshell invocation inside of eval, consider redirecting the output to a file, reading the file to see what it does, and then sourcing it.

Note that we recommend checking for changes whenever upgrading the CLI if you use this approach, as we may modify the output of the completer to fix bugs and issues.

Getting Help and Documentation

Full reference documentation for all CLI commands is available on our documentation site.

You can also view help for any command by passing the --help flag to that command. That will show you any subcommands and options supported by that command.

Try globus --help to get started.

Documentation Topics

Other useful pieces of documentation include…

QuickStart Guide: Once you install, you may want to try running through the QuickStart to see basic login and usage info.
Environment Variables: Environment variables with special meanings to the Globus CLI.
Collection vs Endpoint Handling: How the Globus CLI handles the distinction between Collections and Endpoints.
Reference Documentation: A complete reference to all Globus CLI commands.
Usage Examples: In addition to the documentation, we have some examples of simple and common tasks as performed using the CLI.