Installing the CLI - Shortspan documentation

Install

macOS and Linux

bash

curl -fsSL https://shortspan.dev/install.sh | sh

Detects your platform, verifies the download, and installs to /usr/local/bin when writable or ~/.local/bin otherwise. The fallback is added to your shell profile automatically.

Homebrew

bash

brew install shortspan/tap/shortspan

From a GitHub release

Every release publishes signed checksums alongside the binaries. Download the archive for your platform from the releases page, verify it, and put the binary on your PATH.

bash

# Verify before extracting. A checksum you did not check is decoration.
shasum -a 256 -c checksums.txt --ignore-missing

tar -xzf shortspan_darwin_arm64.tar.gz
sudo mv shortspan /usr/local/bin/

From source

bash

go install github.com/ft72/shortspan/cli@latest

Needs Go 1.25 or newer. A source build reports its version as `dev`.

Windows

In PowerShell. The install.sh script above is a shell script and will not run in PowerShell or cmd.exe.

powershell

irm https://shortspan.dev/install.ps1 | iex

Installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Shortspan and adds it to your user PATH, so no administrator prompt is needed. Open a new terminal afterwards.

From cmd.exe, hand it to PowerShell:

batch

powershell -c "irm https://shortspan.dev/install.ps1 | iex"

Windows on ARM installs the x64 build, which runs under emulation - there is no native ARM64 Windows binary yet. The token is stored in Windows Credential Manager. Interactive SSH and database sessions work best under Windows Terminal; WSL is also fully supported and behaves exactly like Linux, so use the install.sh command there.

Verify the install

bash

shortspan version

Prints the version, the commit it was built from, and the build date. Release builds have these injected at link time; a build reporting dev for all three was compiled locally.

Point it at the right host

The CLI defaults to https://shortspan.dev. If you are on a self-hosted deployment, set the host before you try to sign in:

bash

shortspan config set api_host https://shortspan.internal.example.com
shortspan config list

The CLI refuses a plaintext http:// host unless it is loopback. Credentials over an unencrypted connection is not a configuration choice worth supporting; http://localhost is allowed so a local development deployment works.

Staying current

bash

shortspan upgrade --check   # report whether a newer release exists
shortspan upgrade           # download, verify, and replace this binary

The upgrade downloads the artifact named in the server's release manifest, checks its SHA-256 against the manifest, and only then replaces the running binary. A mismatch aborts without touching what is installed, and the download URL must be on an origin the server allows - a checksum alone would not stop a tampered manifest pointing at an arbitrary server.

The CLI checks for updates in the background at most once a day and mentions it quietly when one exists. SHORTSPAN_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 turns that off, which is what you want in CI.

Uninstalling

bash

shortspan logout              # revoke the token, then clear the keyring entry
rm -rf ~/.config/shortspan    # remove the config file
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/shortspan

Run logout first. Deleting the binary leaves the token valid on the server, and a valid token you can no longer see is exactly the thing this product exists to avoid.