CLI

douban <command> [subcommand] [flags]

Run douban <command> --help for the full flag list on any command. This page is the map of the command tree.

Lookup commands

Command	What it does
search	Cross-category search results (books, movies, music, more)
suggest	Fast autocomplete suggestions for a book or movie query
book	The full record for one book subject (bare id or pasted URL)
top250	The movie Top 250 chart
chart	The weekly new-movies chart
nowplaying	Movies now in theaters (--coming for upcoming)
doulist	The subjects in a curated list (豆列), in list order
version	Print the version and exit

Mirror commands

These build and query a local copy of the catalog. See the mirror guide for the full workflow.

Command	What it does
seed sitemap	Seed the frontier from the sitemap, banded by entity type
seed ids	Seed a contiguous id range for one entity type
seed url	Seed one or more explicit URLs
seed list	Seed URLs from a file, one per line
crawl	Drain pending frontier URLs into the mirror; resumable
export	Stream normalized records as JSONL
info	Show the data dir, record/frontier counts, and disk usage
queue	Inspect frontier rows by status and type
reset-failed	Requeue failed rows for another crawl

Mirror flags

The mirror commands share three flags on top of the persistent set:

Flag	Meaning
--data	Mirror directory (default $DOUBAN_DATA, else $HOME/data/douban)
--frodo-key	Override the Frodo API key (or $DOUBAN_FRODO_KEY)
--frodo-secret	Override the Frodo API secret (or $DOUBAN_FRODO_SECRET)

Shared flags

Every command renders through one engine and shares these persistent flags:

Flag	Meaning
-o, --output	auto (default), table, markdown, json, jsonl, csv, tsv, url, raw
--color	auto (default), always, never; honors NO_COLOR
--fields	Comma-separated columns to keep
--no-header	Drop the table/csv header row
--template	Go text/template applied per record
-n, --limit	Stop after N records (0 = no limit)
--rate	Minimum delay between requests
--timeout	Per-request timeout
--retries	Retry attempts on rate limit or 5xx
--user-agent	Override the request User-Agent
--db	Tee every record into a store (e.g. out.db)
--data-dir	Override the data directory
--dry-run	Print actions without performing them
-q, --quiet	Suppress progress output
-v, --verbose	Increase verbosity (repeatable)

auto output prints a table to a terminal and JSONL when piped, so the same command reads well by hand and parses well in a script.

HTTP and MCP surfaces

The lookup commands are defined once and exposed over three surfaces, so a script, a service, or an AI agent reaches the same records without a new client.

douban serve --addr :8080     # HTTP: GET /v1/<command>?<flags as query params>
douban mcp                     # MCP server over stdio

douban serve mounts each lookup command at /v1/<command>, with /healthz and the OpenAPI document at /v1/openapi.json. Flags become query parameters (/v1/suggest?query=matrix&type=movie&limit=2) and a positional argument can trail the path (/v1/book/1084336). Records stream as NDJSON. The mirror commands are CLI-only and do not appear on the HTTP or MCP surfaces.

douban mcp speaks the Model Context Protocol over stdio, exposing the same seven lookup commands as MCP tools.

What serves anonymously

Book subject pages and the search, suggest, chart, now-playing and doulist surfaces serve fully over anonymous HTTPS. Movie subject and celebrity detail pages redirect to a security challenge, so the lookup commands reach movie detail through suggest and the list commands rather than a per-subject fetch. The mirror reaches the same sealed surfaces through the signed Frodo API.