Introducing the new Box CLI

Key Takeaways

I am super excited to share the new Box CLI with you. We've engineered it to be even easier for people to use and their agents. My name is Carter Robasa. I'm the head of developer relations at Box. And let's dive right in. So, the first thing you need to do is get the CLI. And that's as easy as an npm install. I'm going to switch over to my terminal. Once you have the Box CLI, you need to authenticate. So, let's go ahead and do that. New in this version of the CLI are two authentication experiences. One allows you to log in as yourself using O and the other allows you to create a platform app to create customized scopes for what the Box CLI can and cannot do. But I'm going to go ahead and log in as myself. This is going to open up a browser which gives me uh clear ideas about what scopes I'm granting to the Box CLI. So, I'm going to go ahead and grant that access. And this screen tells me that I'm logged in. Awesome. All systems go. So, we can go ahead and test that by running pretty simple command. This is the users get mini API and it just tells me who I'm logged in as. But that's only half the fun. So, the Box CLI is incredibly powerful. People have been using it for years to automate all kinds of tasks. There's tons that you can do with it. But what's fun is how you can use it with agents. So, I'm going to go ahead and open Claude Code. So, I've got Claude Code opened. So, let's go ahead and give it like a really meaty task. In this case, I'm going to ask the Box CLI to upload all of the invoices that are in the current working directory to an invoices folder on Box. I'm going to run structured metadata extraction on all of those PDFs. Um, I've already defined a metadata template that tells Box what kind of metadata fields I'm looking for. I'm going to have uh that extraction happen on all of these PDFs and then I'm going to ask Cloud Code to then take those values and store them back uh back to Box on each of those individual files. So, we're going to go ahead and uh allow this to grind through a little bit and see what happens. All right. So, as you see, we've gone through all four of those PDFs and we've extracted this metadata. So now let's go over my Box account and make sure that this metadata was persisted back to the files themselves using the Box API. Okay, so you can see that Cloud Code created an invoices folder. All four of these invoices are here. So let's go ahead and just pick the first one. Awesome. And I'm going to go ahead and click on the metadata tab. And there you go. Invoice 7302075. Boom. It matches exactly what's in the PDF. So, this is really just scratching the surface uh of what uh you of developers and non-developers can do with the Box CLI. Uh you can download it today. Uh it's available at developers.box.com or our GitHub repo. And we just can't wait to see what you build and what you automate. Take care. Bye.