honeycomb

Honeycomb CLI

Unofficial CLI for Honeycomb, modeled after the GitHub CLI (gh).

Installation

go install github.com/bendrucker/honeycomb-cli/cmd/honeycomb@latest

Authentication

honeycomb auth login

In interactive mode, the login command prompts for key type and credentials. Non-interactively, pass --key-type and --key-secret (and --key-id for management keys) as flags.

Check the status of stored credentials:

honeycomb auth status

Key Types

Type	Header	Used For
config	X-Honeycomb-Team	Configuration API (boards, SLOs, triggers, columns, queries)
ingest	X-Honeycomb-Team	Sending events
management	Authorization: Bearer	Management API (environments, API keys)

Security

API keys are stored in your operating system's keyring (macOS Keychain, GNOME Keyring, Windows Credential Manager) via zalando/go-keyring. Keys are never written to disk or stored in environment variables. The keyring service name is honeycomb-cli, and each key is stored under {profile}:{type} (e.g. default:config).

All keyring operations have a 3-second timeout to prevent the CLI from hanging if the keyring is locked or unavailable.

Usage

Commands follow a honeycomb <resource> <action> pattern:

honeycomb dataset list
honeycomb board get --slug my-board
honeycomb query run --dataset my-dataset --query-json '{"calculations": [{"op": "COUNT"}]}'
honeycomb trigger create --dataset my-dataset --name "Error rate" --threshold 100

Run honeycomb help or honeycomb <resource> --help for full details.

Available Resources

api, auth, board, column, dataset, environment, key, marker, mcp, query, recipient, slo, trigger

Global Flags

Flag	Description
--profile	Configuration profile (default: default)
--format	Output format: json or table
--no-interactive	Disable interactive prompts
--api-url	Override the Honeycomb API URL

Output Formats

The --format flag supports json and table. Default is table in a TTY, json otherwise. List commands always default to table for compact, scannable output — even in non-TTY or agent contexts.

Agent Detection

When running inside an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Cline), the CLI automatically disables interactive prompts.

Development

go build -o /dev/null ./cmd/honeycomb
go test ./...
go vet ./...
golangci-lint run ./...

The API client is generated from api.json (Honeycomb's OpenAPI spec) using oapi-codegen:

go generate ./internal/api/...