rbw: The Bitwarden terminal client you should be using

While Bitwarden has an official command-line client, it can be slow as it is Node.js-based. For those of us looking for something more agile, rbw is the ideal solution. It is an unofficial Rust implementation that stands out for being extremely fast and for managing vault unlocking through an agent, preventing you from having to enter your master password for every command.

Installation¶

The easiest way to install it is by downloading the binary directly from its GitHub releases. I use gah for this purpose:

gah install doy/rbw

This command will download the rbw binary and the rbw-agent binary.

Initial Setup¶

The first thing is to configure your account and the server:

rbw login

It will ask for your email and the server URL (you can leave it blank if you use the official Bitwarden one or enter the URL of your Vaultwarden instance).

To start using it, unlock the vault:

rbw unlock

Unlike the official client, you don't need to export environment variables with session tokens. The rbw agent takes care of everything in the background.

Basic Usage¶

To get a password quickly:

rbw get "Item Name"

If there are multiple items with the same name, you can use filters or the ID. You can also get custom fields or the username:

rbw get "OpenRouter" --folder "APIs"
rbw get --username "Twitter"

Integration with pi-agent¶

One of the greatest advantages of having a fast and secure CLI client is the ability to integrate secrets into your development tools.

pi-agent allows executing commands to obtain API keys dynamically. This avoids having to save keys in plain text configuration files. In your settings.json, you can configure access to a key as follows:

{ 
    "type": "api_key", 
    "key": "!rbw get 'OpenRouter'" 
}

The ! prefix tells pi-agent to execute the command and use its standard output as the key. Thanks to the rbw agent, this command will run instantly without asking for your master password every time, as long as the vault is unlocked.