tabcmd

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Tableau provides the tabcmd command-line interface that you can use to automate site administration tasks on your Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server site. For example, you can use tabcmd to create or delete users, projects, and groups. This new version of tabcmd supports signing in with both Personal Access Tokens and passwords.

Install tabcmd
Logging in
Examples
Log file

Install tabcmd

You can download and run tabcmd 2.0 as an executable file, or install it on the command line with pip.

Download and run (recommended)

Packaged apps are available for the latest release at (https://github.com/tableau/tabcmd/releases)

For Windows, download tabcmd.exe
For macOS, download tabcmd-mac.zip
For Linux, download tabcmd

Install with pip

To run tabcmd manually as a python module, you can install the latest stable version from PyPI:

pip install tabcmd

Install from the development branch

You can install from the development branch for a preview of upcoming features. Run the following command to install from the development branch:

pip install git+https://github.com/tableau/tabcmd.git@development

Important: Don’t use the version from the development branch for production code. The methods in the development version are subject to change at any time.

Install the older tabcmd client

If you would like to install an older version of tabcmd, you can continue to follow the instructions at https://help.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/tabcmd.htm#tabcmd-install

Logging in

You can log in to the tabcmd CLI in one of four ways. Users on Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server with multi-factor authentication (MFA) must use the personal access token (PAT) method.

Log in with --username but not --password, and tabcmd prompts for the password to be entered
Log in using --passwordfile instead of --password
Log in with a personal access token (PAT)
Log in with --password and the password value listed in the command line. This is the simplest way to log in but it is the least secure and not recommended.

Tip: If your password or PAT has delimiters or certain special characters, the command line might not correctly send your password or PAT to the server. These characters must be escaped. Special characters can be: * comma (,) * semicolon (;) * equals (=) * space ( ) * tab ( ) * plus (+) * semi-colon (;) * ellipsis (...) The escape character to use depends on your operating system (OS). For example, the caret (^) is an escape character on Windows. To use the caret, you must escape it with itself (^) or by enclosing in double quotes. For example: --username "tom^harry" --username tom^^harry For more information about escaping characters for your OS, see How-to: Escape Characters, delimiters and Quotes (Windows), How-to: Escape Characters, delimiters and Quotes (Mac), or How-to: Escape Characters, delimiters and Quotes (Linux).

Examples

The following command demonstrates starting a session:

tabcmd login -s <https://online.tableau.com> -t mysite -u authority@email.com -p password

Here’s how to start a session and delete a workbook with one command. You don’t need login here:

tabcmd delete "Sales_Workbook" -s <https://online.tableau.com> -t campaign -u admin@email.com -p password

The options -s, -t, -u, and -p are among the tabcmd global variables, which can be used with any command.

For more information, see tabcmd Commands.

Log file

Full log information is written to the tabcmd.log file. This file is included in the directory where the tabcmd program is running.