Hermes Agent CLI — Complete Usage Guide
Master the Hermes CLI for managing your agent, skills, memory, and configuration from the terminal.
The Hermes CLI is your control panel — start and stop the agent, search memory, manage skills, and drop into an interactive chat session, all from the terminal. Mastering it makes day-to-day Hermes management fast and scriptable.
Before you start:
- ☑Hermes Agent installed
- ☑Hermes added to your PATH (run 'source ~/.bashrc' after install if the command is not found)
Steps
- 1
Basic commands
hermes start, hermes stop, hermes restart, hermes status — manage the agent process
- 2
Configuration
hermes config show to view current config, hermes config set key value to update
- 3
Memory management
hermes memory search 'query' to search, hermes memory export to backup
- 4
Skill management
hermes skills list to view skills, hermes skills install name to add new ones
- 5
Chat mode
hermes chat opens an interactive terminal session with your agent
- 6
Logs and debugging
hermes logs to tail live logs, hermes logs --level debug for verbose output
Pro Tips
- 💡Type '/' in 'hermes chat' to open the autocomplete dropdown for all slash commands — faster than memorizing them
- 💡Use 'hermes --continue' or 'hermes -c' to resume the last conversation without starting fresh
- 💡Alt+Enter or Ctrl+J in chat mode allows multi-line input — useful for pasting code blocks or longer prompts
Troubleshooting
❌ 'hermes' command not found
✅ Run 'source ~/.bashrc' or 'source ~/.zshrc' to reload your PATH. The installer adds Hermes to PATH but doesn't reload the current shell session.
❌ 'hermes chat' hangs on startup
✅ Check if the model provider is reachable with 'hermes status'. If using Ollama, ensure it's running with 'ollama serve'.
❌ hermes logs shows no output
✅ Hermes may not be running. Start it with 'hermes start', then tail logs again. Check if Hermes is running as a different user: 'ps aux | grep hermes'.