Command Line Interface

The Presto CLI provides a terminal-based interactive shell for running queries. The CLI is a self-executing JAR file, which means it acts like a normal UNIX executable.

Download presto-cli-0.279-executable.jar, rename it to presto, make it executable with chmod +x, then run it:

./presto --server localhost:8080 --catalog hive --schema default

Run the CLI with the --help option to see the available options.

By default, the results of queries are paginated using the less program which is configured with a carefully selected set of options. This behavior can be overridden by setting the environment variable PRESTO_PAGER to the name of a different program such as more, or set it to an empty value to completely disable pagination.

Documentation on the HTTP protocol between the Presto CLI and the Presto engine can be found here.