Glean CLI

glean is a local CLI that authenticates to a company's Glean instance and exposes its REST API. It can search the corporate index, talk to Glean Assistant, look up people, fetch and summarise documents, and manage Glean-side resources (collections, pins, go-links, announcements, curated answers, agents, verification workflows).

Output is JSON on stdout, errors on stderr, exit code reflects success. This makes the CLI ideal for piping into jq.

Prerequisite check

Before using anything in this skill, make sure the binary is on $PATH:

command -v glean

The glean CLI command is provided by brew install gleanwork/tap/glean-cli

If the command isn't found, you shoulkd ask the user if they wish you to install it for them.

If unauthenticated (run glean auth status upon authentication errors) and the user is at a terminal: glean auth login (browser OAuth). For CI or scripts, set GLEAN_API_TOKEN and GLEAN_HOST env vars instead - credentials resolve in the order: env vars -> system keyring -> ~/.glean/config.json.

Always introspect first

glean schema is the source of truth for commands and flags - Glean ships updates, and the schema reflects whatever version is installed locally. Before invoking a command you haven't used in this session, run:

glean schema <command>          # full machine-readable schema for one command
glean schema | jq '.commands'   # list every available command

The reference file in this skill (references/commands.md) is a fast lookup, but if glean schema disagrees, schema wins.

Calling pattern

glean <command> [subcommand] [flags]

Three flags are global and worth knowing up front:

Flag	Purpose
--output <json|ndjson|text>	Default json. Use ndjson when streaming results to a pipeline.
--json '<payload>'	Send a complete JSON request body. Overrides every other flag - use this for any non-trivial request, the schema documents the body shape.
--dry-run	Print the request that would be sent, send nothing. Always use this before any create/update/delete operation.

Short positional flags exist for ergonomic queries (glean search "vacation policy", glean chat "what are the holidays?"), but anything beyond a single string should go through --json.

Commands at a glance

Read-only:

Command	Use for
glean search	Find documents across all enterprise sources.
glean chat	Ask Glean Assistant a question; streams an AI answer.
glean documents	Fetch a doc's metadata, content, permissions, or AI summary.
glean entities	Look up people, teams, or custom entities.
glean messages	Read a specific Slack/Teams message by ID.
glean insights	Pull search/usage analytics.
glean agents	List, inspect, and run Glean AI agents.
glean tools	List and run Glean platform tools.
glean answers	List/get curated Q&A pairs.

Write/admin:

Command	Use for
glean collections	Create/update/delete document collections; add/remove items.
glean pins	Promote a document to the top of results for given queries.
glean shortcuts	Manage go-links (e.g. go/wiki).
glean announcements	Create/update/delete time-bounded company announcements.
glean answers	Create/update curated answers.
glean verification	Mark documents verified; send verification reminders.
glean activity	Log user activity events; submit relevance feedback.
glean api	Raw authenticated HTTP call to any Glean REST endpoint (escape hatch).

For flag-level detail and worked examples on any of these, read references/commands.md - it's organised by command in the same order as the tables above.

Common workflows

Search and pipe into jq. Search returns JSON with a results array; each result has a document with title, url, id, snippets, etc.

glean search "incident response runbook" | jq '.results[] | {title: .document.title, url: .document.url}'

Find then summarise. Combine search with the summarise subcommand:

DOC_ID=$(glean search "Q1 OKRs" | jq -r '.results[0].document.id')
glean documents summarize --json "{\"documentId\":\"$DOC_ID\"}" | jq -r .summary

Ask a question. For any "what does our company say about X" question, prefer glean chat over glean search - Glean Assistant cites the underlying documents in its response.

glean chat "How do I expense international travel?"

Look up a person.

glean entities read-people --json '{"query":"Jane Smith"}' | jq '.[0] | {name, email, title, department}'

Gotchas

• Don't echo tokens. GLEAN_API_TOKEN is sensitive; never echo it, log it, or include it in error messages or commit it to a file. Use it via env var only.
• Always --dry-run first for writes. Any create, update, delete, verify, remind, add-items, delete-item, or report action sends data into the customer's Glean tenant. Print the body first, get the user's confirmation if it's not their explicit ask, then send.
• --json overrides everything. If both --json and individual flags are supplied, the JSON body wins - silently. Don't mix the two.
• Schema, not memory. Flag names and JSON body shapes evolve between Glean releases. If you pass a body and the API rejects it, run glean schema <command> and check the current shape rather than guessing.
• glean api is the escape hatch, not the default. If a dedicated subcommand exists for what you're doing (e.g. glean search rather than glean api search), prefer it - the dedicated command has nicer ergonomics and a stable contract.
• Errors land on stderr. When piping into jq or another consumer, capture stderr separately so you can surface the real error message rather than a "parse error: unexpected end of JSON" downstream.
• Search results aren't always document objects. results[] may contain promoted answers, people, or pinned items - when working programmatically, branch on .type or guard with .document?.