Overview

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The Asterdoc CLI (asterdoc) is a command-line tool for working with Asterdoc artifacts — structured definitions of forms, documents, checklists, and bundles. It takes a registry-first approach: discover and install pre-built artifacts from shared registries, then validate, render, and manage them locally. It's also an authoring tool for creating new artifacts from scratch.

Key capabilities

• Install artifacts from public or private registries
• Create new artifacts (forms, documents, checklists, bundles)
• Validate artifacts against the Asterdoc JSON Schema
• Render layers to PDF, DOCX, or Markdown
• Diff and patch artifacts
• Build and host your own registries
• Generate TypeScript types from artifacts

Installation

The CLI requires Node.js 22 or newer.

npm install -g asterdoc

Verify the installation:

asterdoc --version

The package registers one command, asterdoc.

The CLI is published as two packages with the same version and behavior: asterdoc and @asterdoc/cli. Install one of them, not both. Each registers the asterdoc command, so a second global install fails with EEXIST. These docs use asterdoc.

To run it once without a global install:

npx asterdoc --version

Next steps

• Projects - Project structure, manifest, lock file, and output formats
• Configuration - Global and project settings, environment variables and cache
• Registries - Consuming and creating artifact registries
• Command reference - Full list of available commands