Installation#

Requirements#

On a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu, Mint), install Python 3 using:

$ sudo apt install python3

On a RPM-based distro (RHEL, Fedora), install Python 3 using:

$ sudo dnf install python3

Then run:

$ python3 -m pip install --user cpanel-cli

Test the installation using:

$ cpanel --version

Tested on Ubuntu Linux 23.10 “Mantic”, but it has no specific Ubuntu requirements, so any Linux distro with Python 3.11 or later should work.

Install Python 3 using Homebrew.

$ brew install python

Then run:

$ python3 -m pip install --user cpanel-cli

Test the installation using:

$ cpanel --version

Tested on macOS “Ventura”; should also work on any later release.

cpanel-cli should work on Windows 10/11 using WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Unfortunately I don’t have access to a Windows system, so I can’t confirm this.

To authenticate against your cPanel instance, the recommended way is to create a $HOME/.config/cpanel/cpanel.conf configuration file.

If you don’t want to use the XDG-compliant $HOME/.config/cpanel location, you can use a traditional $HOME/.cpanelrc file.

The configuration file must contain the following:

hostname=example.com
username=scott
utoken=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQSRTUVWXYZ012345

hostname is the hostname of your cPanel instance
username is your user name on your instance
utoken is an API token associated with username. See How to use cPanel API tokens for further information on how to create tokens.

Alternatively, you can set the following environmental variables in your shell:

For example:

$ export CPANEL_HOSTNAME=example.com
$ export CPANEL_USERNAME=scott
$ export CPANEL_UTOKEN=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQSRTUVWXYZ012345
$ cpanel list features

Or you can pass the credentials directly on the command line using the -H, -U and -T options. For example:

$ cpanel -H example.com -U scott -T ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQSRTUVWXYZ012345 list features

Options passed on the command line override environmental variables, which in turn override cpanel.conf or .cpanelrc values.