CLI

The anonymize command starts the local web UI by default and exposes a few subcommands for specific scenarios.

Default — launch the web UI

anonymize

Opens your default browser at http://127.0.0.1:<port>. Same as the web UI flow.

Flags accepted by the default mode:

Flag	Purpose
`-V, --version`	Print the installed version and exit
`--strict`	Enable strict mode (risky warnings block download)
`--no-update-check`	Skip the startup version probe (see Updates)

Process a single file (no UI)

anonymize path/to/contract.docx -o path/to/contract.anonymized.docx

Pass a file as the positional argument to run the pipeline without launching a browser. Accepted inputs: .docx, .xlsx, .pdf, .txt, .md, .csv, .html, .htm, .rtf. Exit code 0 on success, non-zero on I/O or parsing errors. Scanned and hybrid PDFs work here too when anonymize doctor --no-network reports Tesseract OCR ready.

Flag	Purpose
`-o, --output PATH`	Output path. Default: alongside the input with `.anonymized.<ext>` suffix. For `.rtf` input the output is always `.docx`.

Subcommands

Subcommand	Purpose
`anonymize serve [--port N] [--strict] [--no-update-check]`	Start the web UI explicitly. Pick a port or accept the random default.
`anonymize stop`	Stop the running web UI (terminates the process recorded in `~/.anonymizer/run.pid`).
`anonymize update`	Synchronous wrapper around `uv tool upgrade --reinstall-package docs-anonymizer docs-anonymizer`. Streams uv’s output.
`anonymize doctor [--fix] [--no-network]`	Single-shot installation health check. Verifies Python version, package presence, Tesseract OCR readiness, broken updater state, and network probe. Exit code `0` if required checks pass, `1` if any fail.
`anonymize annotate ...`	Manual annotation tooling (prep / comp / rend subcommands). Intended for QA workflows.
`anonymize testkit ...`	Run the golden-corpus testkit. Intended for development and CI.

Examples

Process every .docx in a folder:

for f in *.docx; do anonymize "$f"; done

Diagnose a flaky install on an offline machine:

anonymize doctor --no-network

Start the UI on a specific port without the update banner:

anonymize serve --port 8765 --no-update-check