Redocly CLI OpenAPI Linter and Documentation Generator
Redocly CLI is an all-in-one OpenAPI utility that lints, validates, bundles, and generates documentation from API descriptions. It supports OpenAPI 3.2, 3.1, 3.0, Swagger 2.0, AsyncAPI 3.0, and Arazzo 1.0 with customizable rulesets for API governance.
Redocly CLI is an all-in-one OpenAPI utility that lints, validates, bundles, and generates documentation from API descriptions. It supports OpenAPI 3.2, 3.1, 3.0, Swagger 2.0, AsyncAPI 3.0, and Arazzo 1.0 with customizable rulesets for API governance.
npx skills add agentskillexchange/skills --skill redocly-cli-openapi-linter-documentation-generator
Redocly CLI is a comprehensive command-line tool for working with API descriptions throughout the API lifecycle. Built by Redocly, the company behind the popular Redoc documentation renderer (24k+ GitHub stars), the CLI handles linting, validation, bundling, and documentation generation for OpenAPI and AsyncAPI specifications.
Supported Formats
The tool supports a wide range of API description formats: OpenAPI 3.2, 3.1, and 3.0, legacy Swagger 2.0, AsyncAPI 3.0 and 2.6, and Arazzo 1.0 workflow descriptions. This broad format support makes it useful across organizations with varying API standards.
Linting and Validation
The lint command checks API descriptions against configurable rulesets. Unlike tools that use JSONPath for rule targeting, Redocly CLI uses simple expressions that understand API specification structure, making rules easier to write and maintain. Built-in rulesets cover common API governance concerns, and teams can create custom rules for organization-specific standards. The linter is optimized for speed even on large documents.
Bundling
Most teams split API descriptions across multiple files using $ref references, but some tools don’t support multi-file specs. The bundle command recombines split documents into a single clean file that looks human-written, solving compatibility issues with downstream tooling.
Documentation Generation
The build-docs command uses Redoc to generate beautiful, interactive API reference documentation as a single HTML file. The output is customizable with themes, logos, and navigation options. A preview command enables local development with live reloading.
Agent Integration
For AI agents, Redocly CLI enables automated API governance workflows: lint specs on every commit, catch breaking changes in PRs, bundle multi-file specs for deployment, and generate documentation as part of CI/CD pipelines. Agents can use the structured lint output to suggest fixes for API design issues.
Install via npm with npm install @redocly/cli -g or run without installation using npx @redocly/cli@latest. Docker images are also available. The project is MIT-licensed and hosted at github.com/Redocly/redocly-cli.