fea/references/tea-cli.md

tea CLI — Gitea CLI Fallback

tea is a CLI tool for Gitea. Use it as a backup when MCP tools fail or are unavailable.

Prerequisites

• tea must be installed (brew install tea or go install gitea.com/gitea/tea@latest)
• Authenticated via tea login add (see references/auth.md)

Common Operations

Issues

# List issues
tea issues --repo owner/repo

# View issue details
tea issues --repo owner/repo 12

# Search issues
tea issues --repo owner/repo --state open --labels bug

# Create issue comment
tea comment --repo owner/repo 12 "comment body"

API fallback (raw)

When a specific tea subcommand doesn't exist, use the raw API:

# GET request
tea api GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/issues/{index}

# POST request
tea api POST /repos/{owner}/{repo}/issues/{index}/comments --body '{"body": "text"}'

# Wiki pages
tea api GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/wiki/pages
tea api GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/wiki/page/{pageName}
tea api POST /repos/{owner}/{repo}/wiki/new --body '{"title":"page","content_base64":"..."}'
tea api PATCH /repos/{owner}/{repo}/wiki/page/{pageName} --body '{"content_base64":"..."}'

Debugging

# Check current login
tea login list

# Test connectivity
tea api GET /version

# View repo info
tea repos --repo owner/repo

When to Use tea vs MCP

Scenario	Preferred
Normal workflow	MCP tools (mcp__gitea__*)
MCP server down / unreachable	tea CLI
Investigating errors / debugging	tea api for raw responses
Bulk operations / scripting	tea CLI in Bash