Configuration

hn needs no configuration to run: there is no config file, no environment variable, and no key. Everything is a flag, and the defaults are tuned for everyday use. Reach for these when you want to be gentler on the API or are on a slow link.

Networking flags

Flag	Default	Meaning
-j, --workers	16	How many items to fetch at once. Story lists and comment trees fan out across this many requests. Lower it to be gentler on the API.
--delay	50ms	Minimum spacing between requests, applied across all workers. Raise it (for example --delay 250ms) if you start seeing 429s.
--timeout	30s	Per-request timeout.
--retries	5	How many times to retry a request that returns 429 or 5xx, with a linear backoff between attempts.
--user-agent	hn/dev (+https://github.com/tamnd/hackernews-cli)	The User-Agent header sent with every request.

Behaviour flags

Flag	Default	Meaning
-q, --quiet	off	Suppress the progress lines hn writes to stderr, leaving stdout untouched.
-h, --help		Help for the command.
-v, --version		Print the version and exit.

For the output flags (-o, --fields, --no-header, --template, -n), see output formats.

Environment variables

None. hn reads no environment variables of its own. Everything is configured through flags.