Actana Control

The actana CLI

actana is one program with one name. It installs and operates a Core on the machine you are typing on (machine verbs), and it talks to Cores near or far (client commands). There used to be two binaries under this name; since 0.4.1 there is one.

Install the published client anywhere Node 22 or newer is available:

npm install -g @actana/cli
actana --help

The same command is inside the Core tarball and the Core image. On a machine you turned into a Core with actana setup, ~/.local/bin/actana is that binary, and that Core is registered with this machine's actana automatically — nothing to pair on the box that just installed itself.

flowchart TB
  A["actana on this machine"]
  A -->|"machine verbs"| L["Core on this machine"]
  A -->|"client commands"| R["Any registered Core"]
  L -.->|"also a client target"| R

Machine verbs own lifecycle — install, place, setup, status, pair, update, start/stop/restart/logs, harnesses, uninstall — and are documented where they are used: Install and Operating a Core. Client commands are the nouns core, project, harness, events, session.

Conventions

  • Which Core a client command means: --core <name>, else the current pointer from actana core use. A Core installed on this machine is pointed at automatically.
  • --json is machine-readable output; every list command has it.
  • --verbose explains steps on stderr and never prints a credential.
  • Terminal vs pipe: some commands (the pairing pair, notably) draw framed, coloured output at a terminal and plain labelled lines down a pipe — same bytes as earlier releases, so scripts keep scraping. isatty(stdout) is the whole switch; NO_COLOR strips colour. Behaviour never differs by where output goes.
  • Exit codes are meaningful: 0 ok, 1 failure, 2 usage; actana core exec exits 125 when the link dropped mid-command and the command's fate is unknown; actana core pair has a code per refusal class (table).

In this section

  • Commands — the client nouns: core, project, harness, events, session.
  • Skills — actana-sessions and actana-subagent, written into your Harnesses' skill directories.

See also

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