Oh Dear CLI

The ohdear CLI manages Oh Dear website monitoring from the terminal. Every Oh Dear API endpoint has a corresponding command.

Prerequisites

ohdear --version  # Check if installed
composer global require ohdearapp/ohdear-cli  # Install if needed

Authentication

ohdear login   # Prompted for API token (get it at https://ohdear.app/user-settings/api)
ohdear logout  # Clear credentials

If any command returns 401, run ohdear login again.

Command naming

Commands use kebab-case names exactly as listed in references/commands.md. Do NOT guess command names — always look them up. Common mistakes to avoid:

• sites:list → list-monitors
• monitors:get → get-monitor
• uptime:get → get-uptime

Always check references/commands.md before running a command. If unsure, run ohdear <command> --help to verify parameters.

Output

Commands output human-readable text by default. For any task that requires analysis, comparison, filtering, or counting, always use --json to get structured output you can parse:

ohdear list-monitors --json           # Get all monitors as JSON
ohdear get-uptime --monitor-id=1 --json  # Get uptime data as JSON

Other format options: --yaml, --minify. Use -H to include response headers.

Note: --json works on API commands (list-, get-, etc.), not on utility commands (login, logout, clear-cache).

JSON structure: --json responses are paginated objects {data: [...], links: ...}, not bare arrays. Always use .data[] to access items (e.g. jq '.data[]'), never .[].

Teams

API keys are user-scoped. A user may belong to multiple teams. Monitors have a team_id field but no team_name. To resolve team names to IDs:

ohdear get-me --json | jq '.teams[] | {id, name}'

Then filter monitors by team_id. Do NOT use list-managed-teams — that's a reseller-only endpoint.

When presenting results to the user, summarize clearly:

• Monitors: Table with ID, URL, friendly name, status, checks enabled
• Uptime: Percentage uptime and downtime periods with start/end times
• Broken links: URLs with HTTP status codes and source page (use --run-id with historical run IDs to compare across runs — see workflows)
• Crawled URLs: Always start with get-crawled-urls-summary (tiny payload: totals + by-type breakdown). Only use list-crawled-urls-details with jq filters — it returns 100 items/page and can be very large. Never dump raw details into context.
• Certificate health: Issuer, expiration date, and issues found
• Cron checks: Name, frequency, last ping time, status
• Status pages: Title, URL, associated monitors
• Lighthouse reports: Performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO scores

Documentation

Oh Dear docs are available in clean markdown for easy reading. Append .md to any docs URL or request with Accept: text/markdown:

https://ohdear.app/docs/general/introduction.md
https://ohdear.app/docs/api/monitors.md

Use this to look up feature details, API parameters, or setup instructions when helping the user.

Reference

• Full command list: See references/commands.md
• Step-by-step workflows: See references/workflows.md
  • Monitor setup, downtime investigation, maintenance windows
  • Broken link audits, certificate monitoring, status pages
  • Cron checks, Lighthouse reports, application health, tags