CLI

kivgraph --help, -h and help write to stdout and exit 0. So does a bare kivgraph: an invocation with no command asks what the program does, and it is answered with this same table. An unknown command writes a single line to stderr and exits 2, rather than dumping the whole surface at someone who mistyped one word.

Getting started

Invocation	Summary
init [--repository NAME=PATH] [--languages LIST]	Write the configuration and register repositories
index --full [--json]	Index every registered repository and publish a generation
serve	Run the MCP server over stdio
daemon [--addr HOST:PORT] [--allow-remote]	Serve MCP to many clients from one process, over HTTP and a unix socket
daemon install [--addr HOST:PORT] [--allow-remote]	Give the daemon an owner, so the platform starts it and restarts it
daemon remove	Stop the daemon and take its supervisor entry out
ui [--addr HOST:PORT]	Serve the read-only graph viewer, every interface by default
stop [--dry-run]	Stop every running serve, daemon and ui of this user

Diagnostics

Invocation	Summary
doctor	Check configuration, toolchains and the published graph
doctor repositories [--repository NAME] [--json]	Audit whether every registered repository can be indexed, and say what to change
doctor storage --database PATH	Inspect one LadybugDB database file
doctor graph --database PATH	Validate the canonical graph of a database
graph status --root PATH	Report the active and backup generations
daemon status	Report whether the daemon has an owner, and where its unit lives
stats [--interval D] [--once] [--json]	Watch what every kivgraph process on this machine costs
logs [--follow] [--kind K] [--tool NAME] [--since D] [--limit N] [--failures] [--json]	Read what this machine indexed, served and answered
tool-stats [--tool NAME] [--since D] [--json]	Report the cost and the failures of every tool
version [--json]	Print the release, with —json for full provenance

Maintenance

Invocation	Summary
upgrade	Rebuild the graph after a schema change
clean [--keep-active] [--yes]	Remove published graph generations
rollback --root PATH [--generation ID]	Return to the previous generation
snapshot --root PATH [--generation ID]	Rebuild the hot snapshot of a generation
update [--check] [--stop]	Install the latest published release

Integrations

Invocation	Summary
mcp install [--scope user|project] [--stdio]	Detect and register one or more MCP clients, against the daemon by default
mcp status --target TARGET [--scope user|project] [--stdio]	Inspect a client MCP registration
mcp remove --target TARGET [--scope user|project] [--stdio]	Remove only Kivgraph’s MCP registration
skill install [--scope user|project]	Detect and install the Agent Skill in one or more clients
skill status --target TARGET [--scope user|project]	Inspect the installed Agent Skill
skill remove --target TARGET [--scope user|project]	Remove only Kivgraph’s Agent Skill
completion bash|zsh|fish	Print the shell completion script for one shell

Shell completion

kivgraph completion bash > /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/kivgraph   # bash 3.2 and newer
kivgraph completion zsh  > "${fpath[1]}/_kivgraph"
kivgraph completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/kivgraph.fish

The script is a fixed stub: it carries no command name, no flag and no vocabulary, and forwards the words typed so far to kivgraph __complete. That is what keeps it from going out of date when a flag is added, and it is what lets completion answer the questions a static script cannot: --generation completes the generations on disk, --target the clients this machine has, and --tool the tools this installation has actually been called with. A flag that takes a path defers to the shell’s own file completion.

Pipeline

Invocation	Summary
rebuild --facts PATH --root PATH ...	Publish a generation from a fact set
benchmark generate-graph	Generate a synthetic corpus

Builds without the viewer

ui needs the web bundle, which is only linked in when the binary is built with the webassets tag. A build without it marks the command as unavailable in the help and refuses to start rather than serving a “bundle not available” page. The published release bundle carries the viewer.

Logging

A one-shot command reports in plain text when stderr is a terminal and as a JSON record when it is not; serve and ui always log JSON, because a client reads their stderr. Progress is INFO and only a failure is ERROR.