Developer Resources

1Password command-line tool: Getting started

Learn how to set up and use 1Password from the command line.

Set up the command-line tool

To install the 1Password command-line tool:

  1. Download the tool for your platform and architecture. You can verify its authenticity:

  2. Move op to /usr/local/bin, or another directory in your $PATH.

  3. To verify the installation, check the version number:

    op --version

Get started with the command-line tool

The first time you use the 1Password command-line tool, you’ll need to enter your sign-in address and email address:

op signin example.1password.com wendy_appleseed@example.com

Then enter your Secret Key and Master Password.

After you sign in the first time, you can sign in again using only the subdomain for your account. op signin will prompt you for your Master Password and output a command that can save your session token to an environment variable:

$ op signin example

Please enter your password for user wendy_appleseed@example.com at example.1password.com:
export OP_SESSION_example="XLC6cHkeSHByBqrikXt36fdMVLLdHuoACNFUrNMuRXQ"

To set the environment variable, run the export command manually, or use eval to set it automatically:

eval $(op signin example)

Now that you have a session token, you can start using the tool. For example, to show all the items in your account:

op list items

Session tokens expire after 30 minutes of inactivity, after which you’ll need to sign in again.

Learn more

You can use the tool to work with users, vaults, and items. For example, here’s how to upload a document to your Private vault:

op create document readme.txt --vault Private

To see a list of all the items in your Shared vault:

op list items --vault Shared

The output will show the UUIDs of the items. To get the details of an item:

op get item WestJet

You can use names or UUIDs in commands that take any user, vault, or item as an argument. Use UUIDs because they’ll never change, so you can be sure you’re always referring to the same object. It’s also faster and more efficient.

op get item nqikpd2bdjae3lmizdajy2rf6e

Parse and manipulate JSON output with jq

Every op command outputs in one of two formats: a simple string, like a UUID, or JSON. To parse and manipulate JSON output, we recommend the command-line tool jq.

To use jq to parse a Login item called “WestJet” and retrieve the password:

op get item WestJet | jq '.details.fields[] | select(.designation=="password").value'

To use jq to manipulate a Login item template, set the first field value to “my secret”, and save the item in your Private vault:

#!/bin/bash

D=$(op get template login | jq -c '.fields[1].value = "my secret"' | op encode)
op create item login $D --title "My New Item"

Learn more about jq.

Get help

To check for updates to the 1Password command-line tool:

op update

If a newer version is available, a link to download the latest version is returned.

You can see a list of all commands with op --help, or learn about a specific command with op <command> --help.

Read the full documentation.

Published: