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hscli

Overview

hscli is a fast, scriptable command-line interface for Help Scout. It drives conversations, customers, reporting, and full-account backups from your terminal — and it's designed so that CI pipelines and AI agents can use it just as easily as a human can.

Why it exists

Section titled “Why it exists”

The Help Scout web app is built for interactive work. hscli is built for the opposite: repeatable, scriptable, unattended work. Three properties make that reliable.

  • Structured output — every command supports --output table|json|yaml|csv, so the result is machine-readable with no scraping.
  • Deterministic exit codes — 0 success, 77 not authenticated, 75 rate-limited, and so on. A script or agent always knows what happened. See Exit codes.
  • Secure by default — OAuth tokens live only in your OS keychain, never in plaintext on disk, and the hscli api escape hatch is locked to the Help Scout host.

A first taste

Section titled “A first taste”
zsh — hscli
# list the active queue as a table
hscli conv list --status active


# or as JSON for a script or an agent
hscli conv list --status active --output json --fields id,subject

Where to next

Section titled “Where to next”