CLI Overview

Overview of the Tree-sitter command-line interface

The tree-sitter command-line interface is used to create, manage, test, and build Tree-sitter parsers. It provides a comprehensive set of tools for grammar development, testing, and deployment.

Configuration

The CLI is controlled by two configuration files:

• A personal tree-sitter/config.json config file generated by tree-sitter init-config
• A parser tree-sitter.json config file generated by tree-sitter init

Command Categories

Grammar Development

• init - Initialize a grammar repository
• init-config - Generate a default config file
• generate - Generate a parser from grammar
• build - Compile a parser

Testing and Debugging

• test - Run a parser’s tests
• parse - Parse files
• fuzz - Fuzz a parser

Query and Analysis

• query - Search files using a syntax tree query
• highlight - Highlight a file
• tags - Generate a list of tags

Tools

• playground - Start local playground in the browser
• version - Display or increment the version of a grammar
• dump-languages - Print info about all known language parsers
• complete - Generate shell completions

Getting Help

To see all available commands:

tree-sitter --help

To get help for a specific command:

tree-sitter <command> --help

Environment Variables

• TREE_SITTER_JS_RUNTIME - JavaScript runtime to use for parser generation (default: node)
• TREE_SITTER_ABI_VERSION - Language ABI version to generate
• TREE_SITTER_WASI_SDK_PATH - Path to Wasi SDK for Wasm compilation
• TREE_SITTER_EDITS - Maximum number of edits for fuzzing
• TREE_SITTER_ITERATIONS - Number of iterations for fuzzing
• NO_COLOR - Set to 1 to disable colored output
• CC - C compiler to use for building
• CFLAGS - Additional flags for C compiler