anki-cli (the engine)

anki-cli: the engine under the hood

AnkiBase doesn't reimplement Anki. Every deck, card, review and sync goes through anki-cli (opens in a new tab), a project I built alongside AnkiBase as its engine and released on its own.

anki-cli runs Anki's official engine (the anki (opens in a new tab) package, the same Rust core Anki Desktop uses) as a small headless server. There's no Anki Desktop, no display and no Docker container running a GUI.

Why it exists

Early versions of AnkiBase ran one headless Anki Desktop in Docker per account and talked to it through the AnkiConnect add-on. That worked, but it was slow to start, heavy on memory and fragile. anki-cli replaced all of that with one process that:

  • serves every profile from a single engine, opening a collection only when it's used
  • speaks AnkiConnect's protocol (all 122 actions; AnkiConnect's own test suite passes), plus a faster JSON-RPC API with extras like sync, backups, FSRS and a headless reviewer
  • serves Anki's own Statistics, Deck Options and Card Info screens, which AnkiBase shows as they are
  • keeps an hourly backup of each collection

How AnkiBase uses it

The installer sets up anki-cli in its own virtual environment and runs it as the ankibase-anki service on 127.0.0.1, protected by a generated API key. Each AnkiBase profile is an anki-cli profile: a folder in /opt/ankibase/anki-data/<profile>/ with Anki's usual layout. AnkiBase pins anki-cli to a tested commit and updates it together with itself.

The iPhone app goes one step further and embeds Anki's Rust engine directly, so studying works with no server at all.

Using it on its own

anki-cli works without AnkiBase too, for scripts, bots, or anything that used AnkiConnect:

pip install git+https://github.com/Macro002/anki-cli
anki-cli serve      # AnkiConnect-compatible API on http://127.0.0.1:8765

See the anki-cli repository (opens in a new tab) for the full API and CLI.

ConfigurationAPI Reference ↗