CLI Usage

AuraDeck is primarily a GUI application, but it accepts a single positional argument: a path to either a deck folder or an .adsl archive.

Opening a specific deck

# Folder form
auradeck ./example/extracted

# Archive form
auradeck ./example/example.adsl

In tauri dev mode, pass the argument after a double-dash separator so the Tauri CLI does not consume it:

npm run tauri dev -- -- ./example/extracted

If no path is given, AuraDeck opens with no deck loaded — use File → Open (or Ctrl+O) to pick one.

File-association launches

Once the Linux installer has registered the MIME type, double-clicking a .adsl file in your file manager runs auradeck /path/to/file.adsl. The same mechanism works on macOS (via Info.plist CFBundleDocumentTypes) and Windows (via the bundled .msi installer's file-type association).

Exit codes

AuraDeck always exits with code 0 — there is no scriptable error reporting. If you need to validate a deck or check that it loads cleanly in CI, the recommended approach is to write a small Node.js script that parses manifest.json and verifies each slides[].file exists.

Headless rendering

There is no built-in headless export today. To render a deck to PDF without launching the GUI, you can:

1. Extract the .adsl to a folder.
2. Render each slide HTML through a headless browser (Puppeteer, Playwright) at the deck's aspect ratio.
3. Stitch the resulting images into a PDF.

This is on the roadmap as a auradeck export subcommand. Track issues on GitHub for progress.

Environment variables

AuraDeck honours these environment variables on startup:

Architecture →