How to Get Value from the TE CLI

Key Takeaways

• The CLI enables new workflows: The TE3 CLI enables specific workflows that weren't possible before, such as cross-platform work and agentic development.
• It amplifies what you already have: If you have existing investments in TE3 such as C# scripts, the CLI can be an amplifier for existing work and infrastructure.
• Start by exploring a model: The easiest way to get started with the CLI is to practice exploring a model.

This summary is produced by the author, and not by AI.

What is the TE3 CLI useful for?

If you are used to primarily working with GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), it can be challenging to figure out how to get value out of the TE CLI. This is made more difficult by the fact that the CLI is not intended to be a primary work tool, although you can use it for that.

Instead, it's a supplement that enables workflows not available with Tabular Editor 3 and amplifies tooling and infrastructure you may already have. While this is exciting as a turbo boost to certain ways of working, if those ways are new to you then it's hard to see the value. In this article, we will cover the types of workflows enabled and amplified by the CLI and provide simple examples for each.

CLI as an enabler

The CLI is most interesting for use cases where the Tabular Editor GUI simply isn't available. This falls under 3 main categories:

• Cross-platform work
• Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery
• Agentic AI

Cross-platform work

The most obvious benefit of the CLI is if you use Mac or Linux. Both Tabular Editor and Power BI Desktop are only available on Windows, which means you either have to run Windows in a virtual machine or depend heavily on the web authoring experience. With the CLI, however, you can use interactive mode to explore and review your model.

One example is using the VertiPaq Analyzer to see what is taking up space in your model. If you are on a Mac, then you don't have access to TE3 or DAX Studio which are the main ways to run the VertiPaq Analyzer. However, with the TE CLI, you can run a single command:

te vertipaq

And you will get a detailed analysis of your model:

You can then run more specific commands to look at a specific subset of that, or you could export the information as a VPAX file to be analyzed elsewhere.

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is the practice of using source control and automated tests so that multiple developers can work on the same project and commit code at a high frequency.

As you can imagine, writing tests for traditional programming languages is simpler than it is for semantic models since there are often decades of tooling to support this. Many folks today use the TE2 CLI to run checks automatically as part of a CI/CD workflow. However, there are limitations. The new TE3 CLI supports everything the TE2 does and more.

You can imagine after reviewing the size of your data model, you realize that Auto Date/Time is on and taking up unwanted space. You want to prevent this in all future models, so you set up a GitHub workflow with the following command to make sure that any build fails if any model has Auto Date/Time on.

te bpa run --rule DIABLE_AUTO_DATE/TIME --fail-on error --ci github --auth env

Agentic workflows

While Tabular Editor 3 does come with the AI Assistant, that is embedded in the Tabular Editor GUI and is specifically designed to involve a human guiding it and approving actions. For a fully agentic workflow, you want either a CLI or a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. These provide the agent with specific tools and allow it to work autonomously.

In our experience, while MCP servers like the Power BI Modeling server can be useful for agents, CLIs are more concise and flexible. They can be chained with existing command line utilities that the agent already knows how to use. This is especially true for the TE3 CLI which provides detailed error messages and a variety of output formats.

More importantly, however, is that if the agent is making any changes to the underlying model, it can run te validate to validate DAX expressions and relationship integrity.

CLI as an amplifier

While the most obvious use cases for the CLI are things you simply couldn't do before, the tool benefits the most from existing investments you already have:

• Custom BPA rules
• Existing CI/CD
• C# scripts
• DAX assertions

Now with the CLI:

• If you are using the TE2 CLI, you can expand what it can do and use cheaper Linux runners.
• You can take existing cleanup scripts in C# and now make them part of your build process.

Starting from scratch

With all of this, however, you may still be feeling a bit lost. Maybe you don't have much experience with CLIs and terminals, or maybe you don't have the existing investments in TE3, CI/CD, or AI. In that case, what is a good way to get started?

First, you will want to check out our interactive mode which acts more like a self-contained experience instead of having to run individual command line calls over and over again. When you are in interactive mode, you no longer need to specify te at the beginning of your commands.

Next you will want to use commands like help, status, ls (short for list), and get to orient yourself.

From there you can use commands like bpa, vertipaq, and deps (short for dependencies) to start to investigate the quality of the model. It's worth noting that these all have a rich set of parameters that allow you to be more specific, whether that's using bpa run --fix to automatically fix best practice violations or vertipaq --top 10 to look at the 10 largest model objects.

Finally, it's worth exploring how you can run DAX queries directly against your model with query -q "INSERT DAX HERE". Part of growing comfortable with the tooling is realizing that it's not just a read-only tool but allows you to run scripts, refresh your model, and even deploy it.

Further Reading

• Tabular Editor CLI documentation (Tabular Editor Docs). The command reference and overview for the cross-platform te CLI, including the vertipaq and bpa commands used above.
• Building your Power BI CI/CD pipeline (Fabricated Insights). Daniel Patkos walks through a hands-on Power BI CI/CD pipeline that gates on the Best Practice Analyzer.
• TMDL, Power BI semantic modeling, and version control (lukasreese.com). Lukas Reese introduces TMDL as a text-based, version-controllable format, helpful background for driving models from the terminal.

In conclusion

The TE CLI earns its place not by replacing Tabular Editor 3, but by reaching the places the GUI can't: your Mac or Linux machine, your CI/CD pipeline, and your AI agents. If you already have C# scripts, custom BPA rules, or a CI/CD setup, the CLI amplifies that investment instead of asking you to start over. And if you are new to all of this, the fastest way in is to open interactive mode and practice exploring a model. Pick the one workflow that is most painful today, try it from the terminal, and build from there.