Introducing rhombus-cli: The Building Block for Every Rhombus Automation

Rhombus + Claude Series — Getting Started

If you’re a security director, a facilities manager, or an IT leader, you’ve probably never opened a command line in your life. That’s fine — and yet, this post is still worth your attention. Because almost everything in this blog series, and almost every automation your team will build on top of Rhombus, starts here.

A command-line interface (CLI) is just a way for software to talk to other software without a person in the middle. When your team builds a nightly report, a Slack notification, or an AI-powered workflow, the CLI is the bridge that connects Rhombus to everything else in your stack. No CLI means no automation. It’s the difference between a camera system that serves humans and one that serves your entire enterprise.

rhombus-cli is our open-source command-line interface. It gives programmatic access to every camera, door, sensor, and alert in your deployment — in a form any script, service, or AI agent can consume.

For the developers:

Install on macOS or Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RhombusSystems/rhombus-cli/main/install.sh | bash

On Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RhombusSystems/rhombus-cli/main/install.ps1 | iex

Authenticate via OAuth2:

rhombus login

Verify:

rhombus camera get-minimal-camera-state-list

If you see camera data, you’re done.

The payoff: Once rhombus-cli is installed, your camera system joins the rest of your automated infrastructure. Scripts can query it. AI agents can operate it. Your enterprise stops treating physical security as a silo and starts treating it as another programmable system.

GitHub: github.com/RhombusSystems/rhombus-cli