MUTN/wiki/usage.md

Setup/Usage Tips - MUTN CLI

Most information relevant to the usage of MUTN can be viewed with mutn help, in the man page, and in the demo animation from the README.

Because of this, this wiki page will focus on initial setup as well as some tips that may not be immediately obvious.

Initial Setup

libmutton operates on a client-server model, and thus sync support requires you to have access to your own server (whether it be a physical home server or a cloud rental) with remote access via SSH.

For security reasons, libmutton deliberately does not support password-based SSH authentication; you must use key-based authentication to connect to your server (password-protected keys are also supported). You are responsible for setting up SSH connectivity on your own.

The libmutton server software is shipped as its own dedicated binary (in libmutton releases) and must be installed on the server and configured with libmuttonserver init. The server binary MUST be in your $PATH and MUST be named "libmuttonserver" for clients to successfully reach it.

Once this has been done, you may proceed with the client setup:

1. Install MUTN
2. Run mutn init and follow the prompts
3. If you already have entries on the server, sync them using mutn sync
4. Optionally, shell completions (Bash, ZSH, and PowerShell 7+) can be enabled with your shell's respective method
5. Optionally, import passwords from another password manager. After doing this, you may desire to use the "Age all entries" option from the mutn tweak menu to add initial age tracking data to the imported passwords

Tips

Operating on Passwords

Any action that operates on the password attached to an entry (copying, editing, adding a new password-focused entry) does not require the user to specify the password or -pw options. In all cases, password is the assumed target when no other option is specified.

TOTP Support

See here.

Granular Help

Argument-specific help can be obtained by running mutn <argument> without an entry name or any options. For example, mutn edit will display help for the edit argument.