Meet the Unity CLI: Manage Unity Projects Directly from Your Terminal
The Unity CLI: manage Unity from your terminal
I am introducing the Unity CLI, a standalone binary that lets you manage editors, modules, and authentication entirely from the terminal. Designed for automation, it offers structured output and service-account support for CI. Alongside the experimental com.unity.pipeline package, you can now drive a running Editor or Player and execute live C# code instantly. These tools create a seamless feedback loop, empowering AI agents to observe, act on, and verify changes within your Unity projects without manual intervention.
AI coding assistants are good at writing code and content, but they have historically struggled with everything around that: running the project, seeing what broke, and trying again.
- zulban
Great. For my game https://www.chesscraft.ca I have long had the capacity to compile a separate commandline application using unity code [1]. This lets me do benchmarks and unit tests on the core chess AI code without the editor. However I've had to maintain a separate second unit test suite that I can only run in the editor manually if any unity specific code is involved. Naturally, it's run far less often.
This new unity cli doesn't replace that design, since it's important to me that my core chess variant AI code remains a project on its own, totally independent of unity. But it does mean lots of my utilities like my second unity test, which normally require clicking a button in the editor, can now be run without the editor. Excellent!
I've always just wanted the unity editor to get out of my way. Making a 2d chess variant game means almost all unity features just get in my way.
- thurn
What I really want is the ability to do more operations which are decoupled from the editor. Even just being able to reliably type check Unity C# code without a running editor would be great, or running unit tests. Would really improve things like CI as well as the ability to run parallel development sessions.
- xandrius
Will be exploring this but so far using a Unity MCP has proven mostly enough to do pretty much anything from outside.
I guess the build pipeline part is nice as we can finally have a fully automated build process from build to distribution without finnicky build/postbuild scripts/profiles.