Context - PraisonAI

The context command manages conversation context for AI agents.

Usage

praisonai context [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Commands

Command	Options	Description	Exit code
`show`	`--verbose`	Show current context	`0`
`add`	—	Add context from file or text	`0`
`clear`	—	Clear current context	`0`
`list`	—	List context sources	`0`
`stats`	`--agent`, `--json`	Show token usage / cache statistics	`0`
`compact`	`--agent <id>`, `--threshold`, `--dry-run`	Compact per-agent history in the process-local store	`0` on work done, `1` when empty or no match
`export`	`OUTPUT`, `--agent`, `--format`	Serialise the store to a file	`0` when written, `1` on a fully-empty store

compact and export operate on the process-local get_global_store(). That store is empty unless this same process populated it, so an ordinary praisonai context compact run over a store an agent run filled in another process will find nothing. See Why is my store empty? below.

Examples

Show current context

praisonai context show

Add file to context

praisonai context add myfile.py

Clear context

praisonai context clear

Compact the store

praisonai context compact                 # compact every agent's history
praisonai context compact --agent agent-1 # compact one agent
praisonai context compact --dry-run       # show what would be compacted

compact cleans per-agent history only. It prints Compaction complete (N agent(s)). and exits 0 when work was done.

Export the store

praisonai context export context.json           # snapshot to JSON
praisonai context export report.txt --format txt # human-readable summary

Empty store

The CLI is explicit about empty-state situations instead of reporting false success:

Situation	Command	Result
Fully empty store	`compact`	Exits `1`: “The context store is empty in this process.”
Shared-context-only store	`compact`	Exits `1` — compaction cleans per-agent history only; shared context has nothing to compact
`--agent` matches nothing	`compact --agent X`	Exits `1` with a “no agent matching …” message
Work actually done	`compact`	Prints `Compaction complete (N agent(s)).`, exits `0`
Fully empty store	`export`	Exits `1`, writes no file
Shared-context-only store	`export`	Exits `0` — the snapshot serialises shared context

Why is my store empty?

get_global_store() is an in-memory singleton scoped to the current process. The agent runtime does not write to it automatically — it only holds what a caller populated in this process via the context API. A separate CLI process cannot see a store an agent run filled elsewhere; move it across processes with snapshot() / restore(). See Context Management API → Scope.

This CLI context compact is not the runtime ContextCompactor (the /context compact slash command / ExecutionConfig(context_compaction=True)). The CLI operates on the process-local get_global_store(); the runtime compactor trims a live agent’s chat_history. See Context Compaction.

​Usage

​Commands

​Examples

​Show current context

​Add file to context

​Clear context

​Compact the store

​Export the store

​Empty store

​Why is my store empty?

​See Also

Usage

Commands

Examples

Show current context

Add file to context

Clear context

Compact the store

Export the store

Empty store

Why is my store empty?

See Also