ClickHouse with clickhousectl

clickhousectl manages ClickHouse in two environments:

• Local — ClickHouse installed and running on the user's machine, for development.
• Cloud — managed ClickHouse Cloud services, for production: fully managed, automatic scaling, backups, and upgrades.

This file routes to the right reference. The step-by-step workflows live in ref/local.md and ref/cloud.md — read the one that matches the user's situation before running commands.

Which reference to use

If it's genuinely ambiguous (e.g. "set up ClickHouse for my app"), default to local for development tasks and ask before creating anything in the cloud — cloud services cost money.

Prerequisites (both workflows)

Check that clickhousectl is installed:

which clickhousectl

If not found, install it:

curl -fsSL https://clickhouse.com/cli | sh

This installs to ~/.local/bin/clickhousectl (with a chctl alias). If the command is still not found, suggest export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" or a new terminal.

All commands accept --json for machine-readable output. Exit codes follow gh conventions: 0 success, 1 error, 2 cancelled, 4 auth required.

Related

• When designing schemas, consult the clickhouse-best-practices skill for ORDER BY selection, data types, and partitioning.
• For Postgres (local development or managed ClickHouse Cloud Postgres), use the infra-postgres skill.