SAP HANA Developer Command Line Interface

⚠️ Important Notice - Major Updates (Feb/March 2026)

Version 4.x introduces significant changes including Express 5 migration, refactored database connection handling, and major performance improvements. While we've tested extensively, please be aware of potential issues in your specific environment.

If you encounter problems:

• Report Issues: Please open an issue on our GitHub Issues page with details about your environment and the problem you're experiencing.

• Rollback to Stable Version: If you need to quickly revert to the last stable release before these major changes, you can install version 3.202601.0 (January 2026):

  npm install -g hana-cli@3.202601.0
  

What's Changed: The change log describes all notable changes including Express 5 migration, database connection refactoring, CLI startup performance optimization (60-77% faster), expanded test coverage (85%+ coverage), and the new VitePress documentation site.

📚 Documentation

Complete documentation is available in the docs/ folder and organized with VitePress. This README will maintain a high-level overview and quick links to the most important sections of the documentation but over time expect that more and more detailed documentation will be added to the docs folder as the project evolves.

Quick Links:

• Getting Started - Installation and setup
• Command Reference - All 20+ commands with examples
• Features Guide - CLI, API, MCP, and more
• API Reference - REST API documentation
• FAQ - Frequently asked questions
• Troubleshooting - Common issues and solutions

Run Documentation Locally

cd docs
npm install
npm run docs:dev
# Open http://localhost:5173

Build For Production

cd docs
npm run docs:build
npm run docs:serve

See docs/README.md for complete documentation setup details.

Description

This sample is intended to shown how one could build a developer-centric SAP HANA command line tool, particularly designed to be used when performing local SAP HANA development in non-SAP tooling (like VSCode). It utilizes the default-env.json that is often used in local development for connectivity to a remote SAP HANA DB (although it can of course be used with a local SAP HANA, express edition instance as well). There is no intention to replacing the hdbsql tool as a generic SQL console. Instead this sample will focus on simplifying and grouping common and complex commands that otherwise might a lot of separate scripts.

Introduction Video: https://youtu.be/dvVQfi9Qgog

However the tool isn't limited to only local development. It also works well when developing in the cloud. The hana-cli tool can also run well from a cloud shell in the SAP Business Application Studio, Google Cloud Shell, AWS Cloud9, etc. We can also run against a SAP HANA service for SAP BTP or SAP HANA Cloud instance. This demonstrates that the tool can run just about anywhere you can get a command line that has access to the Node.js Runtime. We can also connect to a remote HANA instance even if it isn't running in the same cloud environment in which we are performing our development tasks.

Supported Environments

graph TD
    A["SAP HANA CLI Tool"] --> B{Development Environment}
    B --> C["Local Development"]
    B --> D["Cloud Development"]
    
    C --> C1["VSCode"]
    C --> C2["Local SAP HANA Express"]
    C --> C3["Remote SAP HANA"]
    
 

... [View full README on GitHub](https://github.com/SAP-samples/hana-developer-cli-tool-example#readme)