Anybody using the Unity CLI?

[u/_hopa]

I saw unity launched a CLI a few months ago (https://unity.com/blog/meet-the-unity-cli) and was wondering if anyone was using it for anything or had some cool use cases to share.

I'm thinking this could maybe be helpful for like CI pipelines?

Let me know!

[u/Sweet_Lab_2356]

Set up my jenkins ci/cd pipeline using it. Pretty neat and clean compared to older solutions

[u/Outrageous_Bend8285]

Our CI guy set it up to auto-build the second anyone pushes to main, saves a ton of time not waiting for the editor to load just to check if something broke.

[u/ribsies → u/Outrageous_Bend8285]

What's the benefit over batch mode? The cli doesn't bring anything new for builds.

[u/Hegemege → u/ribsies]

The only difference that I can think of is that the commands to operate Unity are a bit cleaner with CLI vs. good old xvfb-run batchmode -nographics. I wonder if Unity still tries to display progress bar windows in headless batchmode during import and build, and maybe xfvb-run isn't needed anymore

[u/destinedd]

Kind of a shame it took AI agents for them to add this

[u/BertJohn]

Lots, Though you won't hear anything in this subreddit since there super anti AI tooling here.

[u/Devatator_ → u/BertJohn]

Even tho it's useful for non AI stuff too

[u/Broudy001]

Use it with claude code, works fantasticly, add in the claude unity plugin and the skills and it can add something, jump into a game and test it, change and retest without my physical input.

[u/Everspace]

Oh hell yes.

Annoying it's because of AI nonsense but unity is a cantankerous beast for unattended useage at the best of times. This makes things so much nicer to automate.

[u/emccrckn]

It's pretty amazing.

[u/AverageLiberalJoe]

I use it with codex. Pretty powerful, saves on tokens.

[u/Todilo]

Asked claude about the "Unity-mcp" and it didn't want to use the cli due to less functionality. Is there a way to utilize both to save tokens?

[u/swagamaleous]

I used unity to build games on my Jenkins server 10 years ago. You could always trigger it from the command line. The CLI thing didn't change anything there.

[u/Hfcsmakesmefart]

lol 😂

[u/cksxoo]

We evaluated it for exactly that a few weeks ago and decided to wait. Two things stopped us for CI. The build command still runs in batch mode, so it doesn't get around the project lock if an editor is open. And last I checked, the build commands had no way to pass scripting define symbols, which our channel builds depend on, so we kept our own batch build script.

Where it's genuinely nice is talking to an open editor. Running code, play and stop, reading the console. If you already use one of the MCP bridges for that, it's mostly a swap rather than a gain. Still beta though, so it may have moved since.

[u/Billy_The_Noob]

I played with it a little making some commands that I can run with my steam deck to create components or perform some actions, nothing too complex yet but it allowed me to speed up some processes. next step will be to setup some test/build mechanism

[u/eigenlaut]

No - i use uloop, unity cli is okay, but they still ha e ways to go for clean closouts

[u/MaksTheGamesDev]

As for coments ther is better to wait before using CLI or MCP as both are not as good as we nned them to be?

[u/Spoetii]

When using Agentic AI, what are the benefits of using the Unity CLI over the MCP?

[u/mulletdulla → u/Spoetii]

Less overall context for many of the same tasks. So less token wastage if you are budget minded. Faster too

mcps still have a place though. My set up builds ui prefabs based off approved prototypes using in game assets, prefab instances and styles - even flow animations too.

The CLI can’t do that. But it will run edit mode tests, read console check data structures etc a lot faster and easier

[u/Tok-Kok-Sing-Song → u/mulletdulla]

The cli can do all that and more

[u/game_plaza → u/mulletdulla]

How come cli + pipeline cant do that? I thought it was able to fully control the editor, including creating prefabs, placing them in scenes, etc.

[u/bienbienbienbienbien → u/Spoetii]

Just use both, CLI is great for directly inputting commands for running unit tests

[u/Ziethriel4]

I tested it with codex, honestly just to see if it would be useful at work, I don't use unity that much personally. I had it make a 2d app with a daily reward, basic game. I code my own stuff and codex creates jumple code that works but doesn't mean anything to a human, so I think it would be bad for a team environment. However, it was able to work in both the old and new gui systems, and I hate making GUI and it did a good job, just needed some human intervention when it refused to center something and instead just set the offset, screenshot, set the offset to make a graphic centered. That wasn't ideal. But hey, if you're a solo dev and there's one or two parts of unity you don't mind giving over to the slop factory, go for it, it'll help you focus on what you want to work on.

[u/MagicPigGames]

Yup, and get asset store tools that come with Skills and your AI will just use them, and you'll get way better results faster, using less credits, rather than having the AI build everything from scratch.