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The Bitwarden CLI is a powerful, full-featured command-line interface (CLI) tool to access and manage a Bitwarden vault. The CLI is written with TypeScript and Node.js and can be run on Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions.
If you already have the Node.js runtime installed on your system, you can install the CLI using NPM. NPM makes it easy to keep your installation updated and should be the preferred installation method if you are already using Node.js.
We provide natively packaged versions of the CLI for each platform which have no requirements on installing the Node.js runtime. You can obtain these from the [downloads section](https://help.bitwarden.com/article/cli/#download--install) in the documentation.
The Bitwarden CLI is self-documented with `--help` content and examples for every command. You should start exploring the CLI by using the global `--help` option:
```bash
bw --help
```
This option will list all available commands that you can use with the CLI.