ChatGPT CLI

This is a command line client for using ChatGPT. You can easily ask questions (responses are streamed in real time), tweak system prompt (or other params), include local files, pipe the response and ask follow up questions.

chatgpt-cli.demo.mov

Instalation

go install github.com/edofic/chatgpt-cli@latest

Usage

It uses the API so you need to provide your own token via OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable.

export OPENAI_API_KEY=your_api_key

Without any params the arguments (plural, you can omit the quotes) are taken to be your message

$ chatgpt-cli 'what is the capital of france?'                                                         /tmp
The capital of France is Paris.

Note responses are streamed as they are generated (just as on the web UI) which gives you something almost immediately even for longer responses.

Reading from stdin

Pass - as the message to read the prompt from stdin. Useful for piping in content.

$ cat notes.txt | chatgpt-cli -

Tuning the response

Two flags let you tune the model output:

• -maxTokens sets the maximum number of tokens to generate (default 500)
• -temperature sets the sampling temperature (default 0)

$ chatgpt-cli -maxTokens 2000 -temperature 0.7 'write a short poem about Go'

Interactive mode

If you invoke the CLI without a message, it drops into an interactive REPL. Type a message and press Enter to send; the response streams back and the session stays open for follow-ups. Press Ctrl-D (or Ctrl-C) to exit.

$ chatgpt-cli
> what is the capital of france?
The capital of France is Paris.
> and germany?
The capital of Germany is Berlin.
>

Flags like -c, -systemMsg, and -includeFile work the same way in interactive mode. Each exchange is saved to the session file, so you can resume later with -c.

Follow up questions

You can pass -c to continue last session and ask follow up questions.

$ chatgpt-cli -c 'what about germany?' 
The capital of Germany is Berlin.

Session is stored in /tmp/chatgpt-cli-last-session.json - there is only one "last session".

System message

You can configure the system prompt and tweak behavior this way

$ chatgpt-cli -systemMsg 'You are an assistant that speaks like Shakespeare.' 'what is the capital of france?'
The fair capital of France is known as Paris, my would-be lord.

Files

You can pass in local files as additional messages

$ chatgpt-cli -includeFile main.go 'what is this in one sentence?'               
This is a Go programming language script that uses the OpenAI API to provide a command-line interface for interacting with the ChatGPT AI model to generate chat messages.

Or you can store the output

chatgpt-cli 'write a dockerfile for a Go program, omit any explanation' | tee Dockerfile
FROM golang:latest
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN go build -o myApp .
CMD ["./myApp"]

Model versions

Currently this tool defaults to gpt-5.4-mini. You can alternatively use any other available model by specifying the model name in an environment variable

export OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-4o

Custom API endpoint

To point at any OpenAI-compatible API (e.g. a local LLM server or a proxy), set OPENAI_ENDPOINT:

export OPENAI_ENDPOINT='http://localhost:8080/v1'

Azure OpenAI Service

To use Azure hosted models specify two more environment variables on top of your API key

OPENAI_AZURE_ENDPOINT='https://<your subdomain>.openai.azure.com/'
OPENAI_AZURE_MODEL='<your model deployment name>'

Configuration reference

Flags

Flag	Default	Description
-maxTokens	500	Maximum number of tokens to generate
-temperature	0	Sampling temperature
-systemMsg	""	System message to include with the prompt
-includeFile	""	File to include as an additional user message
-c	false	Continue last session

Environment variables

Variable	Description
OPENAI_API_KEY	API key (required)
OPENAI_MODEL	Override the default model (gpt-5.4-mini)
OPENAI_ENDPOINT	Base URL for an OpenAI-compatible API
OPENAI_AZURE_ENDPOINT	Azure OpenAI endpoint URL
OPENAI_AZURE_MODEL	Azure deployment name