context-cli

context-cli is the command-line interface for the Context platform. It provides a deterministic, scriptable tool for building, inspecting, and auditing context caches across local development and CI/CD pipelines.

Purpose

The CLI is the build-time control plane for deterministic context infrastructure. Determinism guarantees that identical inputs produce byte-identical outputs across machines, operating systems, and supported Rust versions.

• CI/CD Native: Seamlessly build context caches as build artifacts in your deployment pipeline.
• Auditable: Inspect cache manifests and content hashes to ensure context integrity.
• Reproducible: Every resolve operation is byte-identical to the results seen by your deployed AI agents.
• On-Prem Ready: Works entirely offline with zero network dependencies.

Intended users

• Platform Engineers managing AI infrastructure
• CI/CD Pipelines producing deterministic context artifacts
• Security & Compliance Teams auditing agent inputs

Commands

Command	Responsibility
build	Compile .md source documents into a deterministic, content-addressed cache.
resolve	Execute the selection engine locally to verify agent retrieval behavior.
inspect	Validate cache integrity and view metadata snapshots.

Usage

Build a cache

context build --sources ./docs --cache ./my-cache

Recursively ingests markdown documents and produces an immutable cache directory. The cache contains all data required for deterministic selection, eliminating runtime indexing or external dependencies.

Resolve context (Local Audit)

context resolve --cache ./my-cache --query "deployment architecture" --budget 4000

Verify exactly what context an agent will receive for a specific query and token budget. Results are output as JSON.

Inspect metadata

context inspect --cache ./my-cache

Example JSON output:

{
  "cache_version": "v0",
  "document_count": 42,
  "total_bytes": 102400,
  "valid": true
}

CI/CD Integration

Use the CLI to build context caches as part of your deployment artifacts:

# Example CI build step
context build --sources ./docs --cache ./dist/context-cache
context inspect --cache ./dist/context-cache

Platform Role

context-cli manages the lifecycle of deterministic context artifacts.

• Build and verify caches during development and CI/CD
• Audit context behavior locally before deployment
• Produce the immutable artifacts consumed by mcp-context-server

Agents never build context at runtime — they consume caches produced by this CLI.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning	MCP Error Equivalent
0	Success	—
1	Usage error (bad arguments)	—
2	Invalid query	invalid_query
3	Invalid budget	invalid_budget
4	Cache missing	cache_missing
5	Cache invalid	cache_invalid
6	I/O error	io_error
7	Internal error	internal_error

Build

make build     # debug build
make test      # run all tests
make check     # cargo check + clippy
make release   # optimized build, binary copied to dist/
make clean     # remove artifacts

The release binary is named context and placed in dist/.

Spec references

See spec_refs.md for links to the governing specifications.

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