dbcli/mycli

mycli

Rich MySQL terminal client with auto-completion, syntax highlighting, and dataframes.

Homepage: https://mycli.net

Documentation: https://mycli.net/docs

Mycli is known to be compatible with

• MySQL
• MariaDB
• Percona
• TiDB
• Apache Doris

Postgres equivalent

• pgcli

Release 2.x

Release 2.0.0 has breaking changes!

Quick Start

If you already know how to install Python packages, then you can install mycli via pip. This package is always up to date.

pip install --upgrade 'mycli[all]'

or, on macOS (pygments is optional):

brew update && brew install mycli pygments

or, on Debian or Ubuntu (fzf and pygments are optional):

apt-get install mycli fzf python3-pygments

Try Without Installing: uv

uv tool run 'mycli[all]' --help

Try Without Installing: Docker

The images on Dockerhub are out of date! ghcr.io images are preferred. A sample database is included:

docker run --pull=always -it ghcr.io/dbcli/mycli:latest

The same image works with macOS container:

container run -it ghcr.io/dbcli/mycli:latest

Features

• Auto-completion as you type for SQL keywords as well as tables, views, columns, enums, and more!
• Smart-completion suggests context-sensitive completion:
  • SELECT * FROM tab will only show table names.
  • SELECT * FROM users WHERE tab will only show column names.
• Fuzzy history search using fzf.
• Output explorer using fzf or other tools.
• Syntax highlighting using Pygments.
• Multiline queries.
• Favorite queries with positional or named parameters using Jinja. Save a query using

  /fs alias <query>
  

  and execute it with

  /f alias --key=value
  

• Timing of SQL statements and table rendering.
• Many output formats for tabular results.
• Shell-style trailing redirects with $>, $>> and $| operators.
• Polars dataframe transforms and plots with .|, and Parquet saves with .>.
• Querying LLMs with context derived from your schema using /llm.
• Storing passwords in the system keyring.
• Modern defaults such as UTF-8 connection type and SSL.
• Integrations with: SSH, Kubernetes, Vault, and Boundary.

Mycli creates a config file ~/.myclirc on the first run; you can use the options in that file to configure the above features, and more.

Some features are only exposed as key bindings.

Usage

See

mycli --help

Contributing

If you're interested in contributing to this project, first of all we would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude. We've written a small doc to describe how to get mycli running in a development setup.

https://github.com/dbcli/mycli/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

Additional Install Instructions

Shell Completions

If installed via Homebrew, shell completions may already be configured.

Otherwise, to configure shell completions for the current session, execute a command like this:

eval "$(mycli --completions SHELL)"

replacing SHELL with bash, zsh, or fish, depending on your choice of shell.

To permanently install shell completions, the above command may be added to your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or ~/.config/fish/config.fish. To speed up login time, the output of mycli --completions SHELL may be saved to a file and loaded with source.

Alternative Install Methods

These are some alternative ways to install mycli that are not managed by our team but provided by OS package maintainers.

NOTE: OS packages could be considerably out of date.

If present, the fzf package can be used for fuzzy history search, and as an output "explorer" with the \x special command. pygmentize can be used for syntax highlighting within the fuzzy history search. The less package is also expected, but almost always already installed.

Arch, Manjaro

You can install the mycli package available in the AUR. fzf and python-pygments are optional but recommended:

yay -S mycli fzf python-pygments

Debian, Ubuntu

On Debian and Ubuntu distributions, you can easily install the mycli package using apt. The fzf and python3-pygments packages are optional but recommended:

apt-get install mycli fzf python3-pygments

Fedora

Fedora has a package available for mycli; install it using dnf. The fzf and python-pygments packages are optional but recommended:

dnf install mycli fzf python-pygments

Windows

Option 1: Native Windows

Install the less pager, for example by scoop install less.

Install the fzf fuzzy finder, for example by scoop install fzf.

Follow the instructions on this blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20221006045208/https://www.codewall.co.uk/installing-using-mycli-on-windows/

The libraries used in mycli are Windows-compatible, but there are known limitations according to the test suite. The basics work without any modifications, but this configuration isn't supported software at this time.

PRs to address shortcomings on Windows would be welcome!

Option 2: WSL

Mycli is more compatible with WSL than with native Windows, though still not 100% perfect. This is a good option for using mycli on Windows.

With WSL, you are probably using an Ubuntu distribution, in which case recommended dependencies can be installed by

apt-get install fzf python3-pygments

and mycli can be installed by apt-get or by pip (recommended):

pip install --upgrade 'mycli[all]'

PRs to complete WSL support would be welcome!

Thanks

This project was funded through Kickstarter. Our thanks to the backers who supported the project.

A special thanks to Jonathan Slenders for creating Python Prompt Toolkit, which is quite literally the backbone library, that made this app possible. Jonathan has also provided valuable feedback and support during the development of this app.

Click is used for command line option parsing and printing error messages.

Thanks to PyMysql for a pure Python adapter to MySQL databases.

Compatibility

Mycli is tested on macOS (full), Linux (full), Windows (partial), and WSL (partial), and requires Python 3.11 or better.

To connect to MySQL versions earlier than 5.5, you may need to set the following in ~/.myclirc:

[connection]
# character set for connections without --charset being set at the CLI
default_character_set = utf8

or use --charset=utf8 when invoking mycli.

Configuration and Usage

For more information on using and configuring mycli, check out our documentation.

Common topics include:

• Configuring mycli
• Using/Disabling the pager
• Syntax colors

License

Mycli is Open Source Software provided under the BSD 3-Clause License.

The Mycli Docker image and git repository include a copy of the employees sample database provided by Oracle under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.