Can the desktop client print its version via the CLI?

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1

Context

You can see what I’ve tried:

However, appending --version or --help to /app/bin/bitwarden merely causes it to invoke as usual, from what I see.

Rationale

The reason I ask is because, unlike the browser client, which prints its version as YAML, the desktop client prints its versions space-delimited. I want to be able to easily convert this via the CLI into a language that’s easier to syntax-highlight (like YAML) when pasting it into bug reports.

2

Also, “Copy” doesn’t work for me anymore:

3

The Bitwarden CLI is a separate client app, independent from the Desktop app (i.e., invoking the Desktop app binary from a shell command-line does not execute the CLI). Perhaps you are asking if the Desktop app executable has any undocumented optional arguments that could help you achieve your goal?

4

@grb, I am. I don’t want to be forced to try hacks like:

5

Not sure if you’d consider this to be a “hack”, but perhaps you can script something that uses jq to extract the version number from the desktop app’s data.json file:

{
	"global_config_byServer": {
		"https://api.bitwarden.com": {
			"version": "2025.11.0"
		}
	}
}

 

Other than that, open a feature request topic to request implementation of the aforementioned command-line arguments.

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