Installation¶

omeka-s-cli ships as a single PHAR file: a self-contained PHP archive that you run like any other command. Install it on the server that hosts Omeka S.

Requirements¶

PHP 8.1 or newer, command line version, with the pdo_mysql and zip extensions
Omeka S 4 or newer (or none yet: omeka-s-cli can download and install it)
git, only to download modules or themes from a git repository
the curl extension is recommended; without it PHP's HTTP stream wrapper is used, which needs allow_url_fopen

Check the PHP version and the required extensions:

php --version
php -m | grep -E -i '^(pdo_mysql|zip)$'

PHP 8.2.34 (cli) (built: Oct  6 2026 01:32:07) (NTS)
...
pdo_mysql
zip

Install the PHAR¶

Download the latest release and install it as omeka-s-cli in a directory on your PATH:

curl -fsSL -o omeka-s-cli https://github.com/GhentCDH/Omeka-S-Cli/releases/latest/download/omeka-s-cli.phar
sudo install -m 0755 omeka-s-cli /usr/local/bin/omeka-s-cli

Check that it runs:

/usr/local/bin/omeka-s-cli --version

The download URL always points at the latest release. To pin a version, replace latest/download with download/v<version>, e.g. .../releases/download/v0.18.1/omeka-s-cli.phar. All releases are listed on the GitHub releases page.

Update¶

self-update replaces the PHAR with the latest release. It needs write access to the file, hence sudo for a PHAR in /usr/local/bin:

sudo /usr/local/bin/omeka-s-cli self-update

`self-update`¶

Update omeka-s-cli to the latest version

omeka-s-cli self-update

Run as the web server user¶

omeka-s-cli works directly on the files and the database of an Omeka S installation. Run it as the user that owns the installation, usually the web server user (www-data on Debian and Ubuntu, apache on RHEL and derivatives): prefix the commands with sudo -u www-data. Files that the CLI creates as root (downloaded modules and themes, config/database.ini, files in files/) cannot be changed by Omeka S afterwards.

Build from source¶

To run the development version, see Development.