ZAI CLI

Access Z.AI capabilities via npx zai-cli . The CLI is self-documenting - use --help at any level.

Setup

export Z_AI_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Get a key at: https://z.ai/manage-apikey/apikey-list

Commands

Command Purpose Help

vision Analyze images, screenshots, videos --help for 8 subcommands

search Real-time web search --help for filtering options

read Fetch web pages as markdown --help for format options

repo GitHub code search and reading --help for tree/search/read

tools List available MCP tools

tool Show tool schema

call Raw MCP tool invocation

code TypeScript tool chaining

doctor Check setup and connectivity

Quick Start

Analyze an image

npx zai-cli vision analyze ./screenshot.png "What errors do you see?"

Search the web

npx zai-cli search "React 19 new features" --count 5

Read a web page

npx zai-cli read https://docs.example.com/api npx zai-cli read https://docs.example.com/api --with-images-summary --no-gfm

Explore a GitHub repo

npx zai-cli repo search facebook/react "server components" npx zai-cli repo search openai/codex "config" --language en npx zai-cli repo tree openai/codex --path codex-rs --depth 2

Check setup

npx zai-cli doctor

Output

Default: data-only (raw output for token efficiency). Use --output-format json for { success, data, timestamp } wrapping.

Advanced

For raw MCP tool calls (tools , tool , call ), Code Mode, and performance tuning (cache/retries), see references/advanced.md .