cli_overview.md

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# About the Dynamo Command Line Interface

The Dynamo CLI serves, containerizes, and deploys Dynamo applications efficiently. It provides intuitive commands to manage your Dynamo services.

## CLI Capabilities

With the Dynamo CLI, you can:

* Chat with models quickly using `run`
* Serve multiple services locally using `serve`
* Package your services into archive (called `dynamo artifact`) using `build`
* Deploy pipelines to Dynamo Cloud using `deploy`

## Commands

### `run`

Use `run` to start an interactive chat session with a model. This command executes the `dynamo-run` Rust binary under the hood. For more details, see [Running Dynamo](dynamo_run.md).

#### Example
```bash
dynamo run deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B
```

### `serve`

Use `serve` to run your defined inference graph locally. You'll need to specify your file and intended class using the file:Class syntax. For more details, see [Serving Inference Graphs](dynamo_serve.md).

#### Usage
```bash
dynamo serve [SERVICE]
```

#### Arguments
* `SERVICE`: Specify the service to start using file:Class syntax

#### Flags
* `--file`/`-f`: Path to optional YAML configuration file. For configuration examples, see the [SDK docs](../API/sdk.md)
* `--dry-run`: Print the dependency graph and values without starting services
* `--service-name`: Start only the specified service name
* `--working-dir`: Set the directory for finding the Service instance
* Additional flags following Class.key=value pattern are passed to the service constructor. For details, see the configuration section of the [SDK docs](../API/sdk.md)

#### Example
```bash
cd examples
# Start the Frontend, Middle, and Backend components
dynamo serve hello_world:Frontend

# Start only the Middle component in the graph that is discoverable from the Frontend service
dynamo serve --service-name Middle hello_world:Frontend
```

### `build`

Use `build` to package your inference graph and its dependencies into an archive. Combine this with the `--containerize` flag to create a single Docker container for your inference graph. As with `serve`, you point toward the first service in your dependency graph. For more details, see [Serving Inference Graphs](dynamo_serve.md).

#### Usage
```bash
dynamo build [SERVICE]
```

#### Arguments
* `SERVICE`: Specify the service to build using file:Class syntax

#### Flags
* `--working-dir`: Specify the directory for finding the Service instance
* `--containerize`: Choose whether to create a container from the dynamo artifact after building

#### Example
```bash
cd examples/hello_world
dynamo build hello_world:Frontend
```

For a detailed deployment example, see [Operator Deployment](dynamo_deploy/operator_deployment.md).