Environments and migrations > Configuring the CLI

First of all, you need to install the DatoCMS CLI with the following command:

npm install @datocms/cli

You can verify that everything is correctly installed by running the help command of the CLI:

npx datocms --help

Setting up a CLI profile

Although not strictly necessary, we strongly suggest generating a datocms.config.js configuration file in the root of your website/app project to avoid having to repeat a number of options for every command you run.

You can configure the profile with the profile:set command — and re-run the same command at a later time if you need to make some changes:

$ npx datocms profile:set 
Config file not present in "datocms.config.json", will be created from scratch
Requested to configure profile "default"
* Level of logging to use for the profile (NONE, BASIC, BODY, BODY_AND_HEADERS) [NONE]: 
* Directory where script migrations will be stored [./migrations]: 
* API key of the DatoCMS model used to store migration data [schema_migration]: 
* Path of the file to use as migration script template (optional): 
Writing "datocms.config.json"... done

Most of the time, you can just simply confirm the default values suggested by the CLI. Once done, add the config file to your Git repository:

git add datocms.config.json
git commit -m "Add datocms.config.json file"

Specify a DatoCMS API token

Before working with migrations, you also need to set up the API token to use to perform all the operations.

You can either pass it as a flag to every command, e.g.:

$ npx datocms migrations:run --api-token=<YOUR-API-TOKEN> [...]

Or expose it as an environment variable:

$ export DATOCMS_API_TOKEN=<YOUR-API-TOKEN>
$ npx datocms migrations:run [...]

The CLI also loads environment variables from a .env file, so you can also place the token there — but make sure not to commit the file to your repo!

$ echo '.env' >> .gitignore
$ echo 'DATOCMS_API_TOKEN=<YOUR-API-TOKEN>' >> .env