CLI Reference¶

The lc CLI is a thin wrapper around the engine. The user-facing surface is small on purpose — the heavy lifting happens through Claude Code skills, with the CLI as the durable, scriptable backstop.

Global behavior¶

~/.lightcone/config.yaml is created automatically on first use of any lc command. You do not need to create it manually.
All commands except init walk up from the cwd looking for astra.yaml. If none is found, the command errors out.

Commands¶

Command	Purpose
`lc init`	Scaffold a new ASTRA project (`astra.yaml`, `.claude/`, `.lightcone/`, optional venv & git).
`lc run`	Generate the Snakefile and dispatch through Snakemake + Dask.
`lc build`	Build container images declared in `astra.yaml`.
`lc status`	Manifest-driven status report. No Snakemake import needed.
`lc verify`	Recompute hashes, walk the input chain, surface tampering.
`lc export`	Emit interoperable bundles (Workflow Run RO-Crate) for publication.

Global options¶

lc [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --version  Show the version and exit.
  --help     Show this message and exit.

Removed commands¶

For historical context: lc dev, lc setup, lc target, and lc update no longer exist as explicit commands. lc eval is available when the eval extra is installed (pip install lightcone-cli[eval]); without it the import is silently skipped and lc eval will fail with "No such command". See the removal pages for details.