Human CLI

The human CLI — reaching your human when you need one

human (package @novu/human) is a small CLI whose only job is getting a real decision from a real person: ask a question, approve an action, choose between options, or tell them something — over Telegram, Slack, or email, wherever they set it up to reach them. Each blocking command waits until they respond (or it times out) and then your process continues.

When to reach for this vs. just asking in chat

If the person you're working for is actively watching this conversation and can answer your next message, just ask them normally — don't shell out to human for routine back-and-forth. Reach for human when:

• You're running unattended — a background task, a scheduled/cron job, an autonomous loop, a CI step, or any context where there's no live chat to post a question into and get an answer back.
• The action is risky or irreversible — deleting data, deploying to production, spending money, sending something externally-visible. Even in an interactive session, get an explicit human approve before doing these, so there's a real audit trail of who approved what and when.
• There's a genuine multi-way decision and guessing wrong is expensive — use choose instead of picking silently or asking a rhetorical question nobody will answer.
• You finished something long-running and want to tell someone, without blocking on a reply — use tell.

Don't use it as a crutch to avoid making reasonable calls you're equipped to make yourself, and don't use it to relay simple status updates the calling process/logs already surface.

Before you rely on it: check it's set up

human needs one-time setup by the actual human (npx @novu/human setup). If it isn't configured on this machine yet, every command exits 1 with:

No human connected yet. Ask your human to run: npx @novu/human setup (or set NOVU_SECRET_KEY + HUMAN_TO).

Treat that message as the actual next step: surface it to whoever is reachable (chat, PR description, logs) rather than silently giving up or looping. Never attempt to configure it on the human's behalf — you don't have their Telegram/Slack/email credentials, and setup is interactive by design.

The no-account (keyless) setup is a free demo with a small message allowance. When it runs out, commands exit 1 with a message containing a sign-up link:

You've used the 5 free messages of this keyless demo.
Sign up to keep your channels and continue: https://dashboard.novu.co/connect/claim?token=...

The human already received that link on their channel. Stop retrying, surface the link where the human will see it, and wait — the human signs up and then re-points the CLI with human setup --secret-key <key> (or NOVU_SECRET_KEY).

In sandboxes and containers with no config file, the CLI is fully operational when NOVU_SECRET_KEY and HUMAN_TO are set in the environment (optionally HUMAN_VIA for the channel). --to/--via flags still override the env values.

To reach a different person than the one who ran setup, they need a linked channel too:

human invite alice --via slack --name "Alice Chen"
human invite bob --via telegram --async --name "Bob"
human invite carol --via email --email carol@acme.com --name "Carol Diaz"

Send them the printed URL (Slack authorize or Telegram Start). --async prints the URL and returns immediately. This does not change ~/.novu/human.json. After they connect, address them with --to alice. --name is what human contacts shows next to the id, so always pass it when you know who the person is.

Who can I reach: check contacts before coordinating between people

When a task involves more than the one human who ran setup — routing a question to the right owner, getting a second approval, telling someone else a job finished — look before you ask:

human contacts --json

Each row is a subscriber the environment knows about: id (the subscriberId), firstName/lastName, email, phone, free-form data, and self: true on the person who ran setup (the default --to when you pass nothing). Pages are 50 rows by default; when next is non-null, fetch the rest with human contacts --after <next> before concluding someone isn't there. Pick by name or id and pass the id to --to:

human approve "Ship the pricing change?" --to alice
human tell "Deploy is done." --to alice,bob

Contacts is a directory, not a reachability guarantee. If delivery fails with "no linked endpoint", that person exists but hasn't connected the channel yet — run human invite <id> --via <channel> --name "…", send them the URL, and retry. Never invent an id that isn't in the list, and never page self as if they were a third party.

The four commands

human ask "Which environment should I target: staging or prod?"
human approve "Delete 342 rows flagged as stale from the orders table?"
human choose "Pick a rollout strategy" --option canary --option "blue-green" --option "all at once"
human tell "Nightly build finished — 0 failures, deployed to staging."

• ask / choose return the human's answer as plain text on stdout.
• approve / choose deliver buttons; the human taps one.
• choose renders each option's full text in the message and labels the buttons themselves just A/B/C (chat button UIs, Telegram especially, truncate or wrap long button labels badly). Write full, descriptive --option values — don't shorten them to fit a button, that's handled for you. Cap it at 10 options (A–J); past that, ask a plain question instead.
• tell is one-way — it returns as soon as it's delivered, never blocks.

Exit codes — branch on these, don't parse prose

if human approve "Deploy to production?"; then
  echo "approved, proceeding"
else
  code=$?
  if [ "$code" -eq 10 ]; then echo "denied, stopping"; exit 1; fi
  if [ "$code" -eq 11 ]; then echo "no answer yet, will resume: human wait <id>"; fi
fi

Add --json to any command to get the full interaction object (id, status, response, timestamps) instead of prose — parse that when you need structured data rather than scraping stdout text.

Waiting behavior

Commands block by default and print a live spinner (on stderr, so stdout stays clean for scripts) until the human answers. Two flags change that:

• --timeout 10m — give up waiting after this long. On timeout the command prints the interaction id and exits 11; resume later with human wait <id>.
• --async — don't block at all; print the id immediately and check back with human wait <id> or human list.

Use --timeout for anything inside a larger workflow that shouldn't hang forever waiting on a human who might be asleep; use --async when you have other useful work to do while you wait.

Useful flags

• --from "deploy-bot" — label shown to the human so they know which agent is asking. Set this whenever you have a stable identity (skip it for one-off ad hoc runs).
• --to <humanId> / --via <telegram|slack|email> — --to addresses humans who are already linked. Find them with human contacts --json first; link someone new with human invite alice --via slack --name "Alice Chen" (prints a connect URL for them; does not change your local identity). --to alice,bob lets any listed human settle (first valid answer wins, max 50). --via on ask/approve is only a delivery override when that person has several channels; don't guess — if you need a specific one, pass --via. If they have no endpoint yet, the API tells you to run human invite <id> --via <channel>.
• --ttl 2h — how long the request stays answerable before it expires (default 24h, max 72h). Shorten this for anything time-sensitive so a stale approval can't be actioned days later.
• --icon — Slack only; MCP catalog id (stripe, github) or https URL (32×32). Ignored on other channels.
• --subtitle, --body — optional card chrome on every channel.
• Approve only: --approve-label, --deny-label, repeatable --extra-action trust-tool:"Always allow this tool".
• Choose --option also accepts id:label (--option stg:Staging).

human approve "Should we deploy to staging?" \
  --icon stripe \
  --subtitle "issue_refund: ORD-42" \
  --body "Refund $25.00" \
  --extra-action trust-tool:"Always allow this tool"

human choose "Which environment?" \
  --option stg:Staging \
  --option prd:Production \
  --subtitle "This cannot be undone"

Checking in without asking something new

• human list — see pending/recent interactions (useful before creating a duplicate ask).
• human wait <id> — resume blocking on something you created with --async or that previously timed out.
• human cancel <id> — withdraw a pending request you no longer need answered (e.g. you found another way forward).