Barcode command line interface (CLI)

Generate barcodes on Linux, macOS and Windows

ActiveBarcode: Generate barcodes at the command line

You can use the ActiveBarcode command line tool to create barcode images files directly from the command line. Use it in the shell, in scripts or applications.

ActiveBarcodeCLI is a non-interactive barcode image creator.
ActiveBarcodeCLI is open source hosted on github: You can contribute, redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU GPL.
ActiveBarcodeCLI is a simple bash script as a wrapper tool for the ActiveBarcode REST API to easily create highly accurate barcode images at the command line.
It can be used to create png and jpg bitmaps.
It helps to automate your barcode needs, is versatile and platform independent.
ActiveBarcodeCLI runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
ActiveBarcodeCLI installs quick and easy via 🍺 Homebrew.
Very compact and lightweight and therefore also perfectly suited for embedded systems.
Runs on low end devices such as Raspberry Pi.
The installation of the ActiveBarcode software suite for Windows is not required.

Highly accurate barcodes

At the command line

PNG and JPG image files

Automation

Versatile in use

Examples

The following call of the tool will create a 400x200 pixels sized PNG image file named ean.png with an EAN-13 barcode encoding 192837465012.

ActiveBarcodeCLI --text=192837465012 --code=ean13 --width=400 --height=200 ean.png

One more example: The following call of the tool will create a 500x100 pixels sized JPG image file named code128.jpg with an Code 128 barcode encoding Hello World.

ActiveBarcodeCLI --text='Hello World' --type=14 --width=500 --height=100 code128.jpg

Installation

With Homebrew

brew install schenk/barcode/activebarcodecli

For alternate installation methods check out the project page on github.

Command line parameters for the console

Usage:

ActiveBarcodeCLI [OPTION]... [FILENAME]

The following parameters can be used:

text

Example: --text=123456789012

Characters to be encoded.
You can enter control codes in human readable form like this: <CR>, <LF>, ...

ActiveBarcodeCLI "--text=(02)00614141000418(15)210228(10)451214<FNC1>(37)20" --type=28 gs1.png

If you want to use the quotation mark within the text, you can escape it. To escape special characters in bash, you can generally precede the character with a backslash (\). This tells bash to interpret the next character literally.

ActiveBarcodeCLI "--text=ABC\"123" --type=14 test.png

Or you can enter any ASCII character with printf. Example to encode ABC"123:

ActiveBarcodeCLI "--text=ABC$(printf "\x22")123" --type=14 test.png

type

Example: --type=0

Barcode type, referenced by an indexed number

code

Example: --code=CODECODE128

Barcode type, referenced by the name

width

Example: --width=500

Width in pixels

height

Example: --height=500

Height in pixels

alignment

Example: --alignment=1

Alignment
0=left
1=center
2=right

borderwidth

Example: --borderwidth=10

Borderwidth in pixels

borderheight

Example: --borderheight=1

Borderheight in pixels

notchheightinpercent

Example: --notchheightinpercent=25

The notch height in %

showtext

Example: --showtext=off

Hide the textline under the barcode. Default is on.

forecolor

Example: --foreground=000000 | -foreground=black

Sets the foreground color, hexadecimal RGB as RRGGBB
or with CSS/HTML color names

backcolor

Example: --background=FFFFFF | -background=white

Sets the background color, hexadecimal RGB as RRGGBB
or with CSS/HTML color names

rotate

Example: --rotate=180

Rotates the image file
(valid values: 0-359)

help

Example: --help

A detailed help page

access

Example: --access=YOUR-KEY-HERE

You can try out and evaluate the REST API by omitting the API key. Without the access key, the barcode will be branded with a notice: DEMO