Hi all, here’s something I’ve been working on and using internally at Koloki for most of this year so far.
What is it?
It’s a comprehensive Admin CLI, particularly suited to those managing multiple self-hosted Discourses. It shares a lot of feature-set with Discourse MCP, but it’s also able to perform command-line fleet updates over SSH, pull entire Categories to folders containing .md files, and push them back up.
I am actively developing it for my own purposes, it lives on my $PATH and so I can use it from anywhere to interact with any of the Discourses I’ve configured in my dsc.toml- this can mean doing updates individually or as a fleet, posting in a Discourse, and of course it’s particularly useful with LLMs in local coding harnesses.
It is able to make changes to any part of Discourse that the supplied API key would be able to change. If you’re an Admin, this is basically everything - so remember, With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Example prompts
These are the kinds of things that work using dsc and a local coding agent
“use
dscto make a copy of the current active theme on MyDiscourseForum, and convert it to a ‘dark mode’ version.”
“use
dscto update all my Discourses now”
“Extract the frequently asked questions from this .docx, remove any duplicates, create a FAQ Category, and upload each FAQ question as a separate Topic in that FAQ Category”
It is also pretty good at debugging things that are not working as expected on a forum.
August 2026 PostgreSQL upgrade
IMPORTANT: Right now (August 2026) Discourse is upgrading the version of PostgreSQL when you do a CLI upgrade. dsc might not work for upgrades quite as smoothly as usual. My recommendation is to use SSH and the standard git pull; ./launcher rebuild app workflow, because you will need to run the launcher upgrade again after the PG update.
AGENTS.md
Use the AGENTS.md to get your LLM and harness rapidly up to speed with using dsc to do rapid, safe, and productive work on your forums.
Roadmap, feature requests, bugs, and feedback
The roadmap for additions is here dsc/spec/roadmap.md at main · koloki-co/dsc · GitHub
Feature requests are welcome, but should be specific, small, and reasoned and should fit with the overall pattern of the CLI. PRs welcome but do please discuss it first. Vibe-coded 50-file semi-rewrites will not be merged. For security disclosures please email: marcus@koloki.co
I’m very happy to collaborate with others to improve this, or even potentially to merge it into other tools to make for a more comprehensive and capable ‘standard Discourse tooling’.
General feedback is very welcome right here in this topic.