CLI

shikiphp ships a small command-line tool at bin/shikiphp (installed as vendor/bin/shikiphp in your project). It has three commands: highlight renders one file to HTML, and langs and themes list what the bundle contains.

highlight

Highlight a file to HTML, printed to stdout.

vendor/bin/shikiphp highlight <file> [--lang=<lang>] [--theme=<theme>]

• <file> — the path to read. It must be an existing file; standard input is not read.
• --lang — the language id or alias. If omitted, the file extension is used as-is as the id (falling back to txt when there is none).
• --theme — the theme id. Defaults to github-dark.

vendor/bin/shikiphp highlight src/App.php --lang=php --theme=nord

The output is the same single-theme <pre class="shiki …"> block that codeToHtml returns, followed by a newline, so it can be redirected straight into a file:

vendor/bin/shikiphp highlight src/App.php --theme=github-light > app.html

The command takes no other options. For dual themes, transformers, or any other option, call the PHP API instead.

Options and arguments

Options must use the --name=value form. Any other argument that starts with -- is ignored, and the last argument that does not start with -- is taken as the file. --lang php file.rs therefore highlights file.rs as Rust: --lang is ignored, php is replaced by file.rs, and the language comes from the .rs extension.

Language inference

Without --lang, the extension becomes the language id unchanged. That works whenever the extension is itself a bundled id or alias — php, js, ts, tsx, py, rs, go, md, yml, json, sh, and many more (see Languages). It does not work for:

• files without an extension, such as Makefile or Dockerfile, which fall back to txt;
• extensions that are not a language id, such as .txt.

txt is not a bundled language, so both cases currently stop with an Unknown language "txt" error (#3). Pass --lang for these files:

vendor/bin/shikiphp highlight Dockerfile --lang=docker
vendor/bin/shikiphp highlight Makefile --lang=make

langs

Print every id the bundle accepts as a language, one per line.

vendor/bin/shikiphp langs

The list has 350 lines: the 253 bundled grammar ids in bundle order (not alphabetical), followed by their 97 aliases (js, cjs, mjs, and so on). The grammar ids include 18 helper grammars that other grammars embed, such as vue-directives and es-tag-css; see Languages for the catalog with names and aliases. Pipe through sort for an alphabetical list.

themes

Print every bundled theme id, one per line, in alphabetical order (65 themes).

vendor/bin/shikiphp themes

See Themes for the catalog with names and light/dark types.

Help and exit status

Run with no command, or -h / --help / help, to print usage.

vendor/bin/shikiphp --help