CLI Overview

The universal-plugin CLI transforms a canonical root plugin.json into vendor-specific manifests.

Invocation

Always pin to an exact version in hooks and CI:

# One-off
npx universal-plugin@latest --help

# Scripting (pin)
npx universal-plugin@$(npm view universal-plugin version) <command>

Commands

Command	Purpose
build	Generate vendor manifests from root plugin.json
config	Read/write plugin-registered config in .agents/universal-plugin.json

Fast alternative: upx

Alongside the universal-plugin CLI, npm i -g universal-plugin also installs upx — a lean, local-first package runner. upx <pkg>@^<major> resolves the range against an already-installed version and spawns it directly (~10× faster than npx, which pays ~1s of resolve+spawn overhead per call even when cached), falling back to npx when nothing local satisfies the range. Requires upx on PATH (a global install), so it’s an opt-in swap, not a drop-in replacement for npx.

Output formats

Most subcommands accept --format:

Value	Consumer	Output
(default)	Humans	Tables, aligned fields
--format json	Scripts / pipelines	Flat JSON

--json is a deprecated alias for --format json.