Command reference¶

phpbotscout --help lists fourteen commands. Three of them are this project's; the rest come from go-tool-base, the framework the tool is built on, and behave the same way in every phpboyscout tool.

phpbotscout's own commands¶

Command	Description
`serve`	Run the daemon — the Discord gateway and the scheduled index refresh
`ask`	Answer a question from the indexed documentation
`index`	Manage the knowledge index
`index sources`	List discovered sources and why each was admitted or rejected
`index build`	Build the index from scratch
`index refresh`	Re-index only the sources that have changed
`index status`	Report what is indexed and how stale it is

Commands inherited from the framework¶

These are not documented page by page here — they are the framework's surface rather than this tool's, and they are documented with it. What is worth knowing is that they exist, because --help lists them and nothing else in these docs mentions them.

Command	What it does	Notes for phpbotscout
`init`	Create the configuration file and bootstrap subsystems	Run this first: most commands refuse to start without a config file
`config`	Get, set, list, validate and locate configuration	`config path` prints which files are actually being read
`doctor`	Run diagnostic checks and print a pass/warn/fail report	`doctor report` produces a redacted, paste-ready support bundle
`version`	Print version, commit and build date	Also checks the release source — see the warning below
`update`	Replace the running binary with a newer release	No release has been cut yet, so there is nothing to update to
`changelog`	Show the embedded version history	Embedded at build time
`telemetry`	Enable, disable, inspect or reset usage telemetry	Off unless you opt in
`docs`	Browse the embedded documentation in the terminal	Needs a build carrying the docs assets; a plain `go install` build omits them
`mcp`	Run phpbotscout as an MCP server for an AI editor
`completion`	Generate a shell completion script

version and update report an error until the first release exists

phpbotscout has never been tagged, so the release source has nothing to return. Any command that checks it logs:

ERRO failed to check for latest version error="failed to get latest release: no releases found"

The command still does its own job — the check is best-effort and does not change the exit code. The line stops appearing once a release is cut.

Global flags¶

Declared on the root command, so every command above accepts them.

Flag	Type	Default	Meaning
`--config`	string array	`/etc/phpbotscout/config.yaml`, `$HOME/.phpbotscout/config.yaml`	Config files to read. Naming one replaces the defaults rather than adding to them, and suppresses the project-local `.phpbotscout.yaml` layer
`--debug`	bool	`false`	Force debug-level logging, whatever `log.level` says
`--ci`	bool	`false`	Declare a CI environment. A literal credential in config is refused when CI is signalled
`--output`	string	`text`	Output format: `text` or `json`
`-h`, `--help`	bool	`false`	Help for the command

--config is the one most likely to surprise: it is a replacement, not an addition. See where configuration is read from.

What the commands cannot do¶

They cannot post to Discord. serve reads; nothing in this binary sends a message, opens a thread or moderates. See what phpbotscout does not do.
They cannot index a repository you name. The corpus is enumerated from the forge and filtered by a predicate; no flag or config key adds a source by hand. See what the bot is allowed to read.
They have no flag for the AI provider. ask reads ai.provider and ai.model from configuration only — there is no --provider on phpbotscout ask. The framework's docs ask has such a flag, but that is a different command answering from embedded documentation.