bundesrat-cli

Follow Germany's Bundesrat — the chamber of the sixteen Länder — from your terminal. bundesrat is a command-line tool over the Bundesrat's public data feeds (the data behind the official Bundesrat app): the current plenary sitting's agenda and its Drucksachen, the members, and committee dates — as clean JSON you can pipe straight into jq.

• The current sitting's agenda — every Tagesordnungspunkt (TOP) with its Drucksache number, in one command.
• The members — all Bundesrat members with party and Land, filterable by --state / --party.
• Open data only — the CLI surfaces just the openly-licensed facts (names, parties, Länder, TOP/Drucksache numbers, dates). The feeds' copyright editorial text and images are deliberately not exposed — see DATA_LICENSE.md.
• No API key — the feeds are public.
• Clean JSON output — pretty by default, --compact for scripting, -o <file> to write to disk.

Want to use this as a TypeScript library, or curious how it parses the XML feeds with zero dependencies? See DEVELOPING.md.

Install

npm i -g @maschinenlesbar.org/bundesrat-cli

This installs the bundesrat command. Requires Node.js 20+. No API key.

Check it works:

bundesrat session | jq '.title'

Quickstart

# The current plenary sitting: title + agenda items with their Drucksachen
bundesrat session | jq '{title, tops: [.tops[] | {toptitle, topdrucksache, topheader}]}'

# Every member from Bavaria
bundesrat members --state Bayern | jq -r '.[] | "\(.firstname) \(.name) — \(.party)"'

# All Green members across the Länder
bundesrat members --party grüne | jq length

# Committee appointments with their dates
bundesrat appointments | jq -r '.[] | "\(.startdate // "")\t\(.title)"'

Commands

| Command | What it shows | | --- | --- | | session | Current plenary sitting: title, date and agenda items (TOPs) with their Drucksachen | | members | Members of the Bundesrat (--state <Land>, --party <text>) | | appointments | Committee appointments and dates (Termine) |

New to terms like TOP, Drucksache or Land? The Glossary decodes every one.

Why only three commands? The Bundesrat feeds also carry news/press items, the BundesratKOMPAKT editorial summaries, the Stimmverteilung graphic, and the Präsidium / next-sitting HTML pages. Those return copyright-protected editorial text and images, not open data, so this CLI doesn't expose them (and strips the editorial fields — HTML detail, biographies, images — from the three it keeps). See DATA_LICENSE.md.

members filters

| Option | Meaning | | --- | --- | | --state <Land> | Only members of that federal state — case-insensitive, exact Land match (e.g. Bayern, Baden-Württemberg) | | --party <text> | Only members whose party contains this text — case-insensitive substring (e.g. grüne, CDU) |

Filtering happens client-side (the feed returns everyone), so both filters compose and an unmatched filter yields [] rather than the full list.

Output & scripting

Every command prints JSON to stdout; diagnostics go to stderr, so piping into jq stays clean.

# How many agenda items in the current sitting?
bundesrat session | jq '.tops | length'

# Drucksachen on the agenda
bundesrat session | jq -r '.tops[].topdrucksache | select(.)'

# Members grouped by party
bundesrat members | jq -r 'group_by(.party)[] | "\(.[0].party): \(length)"'

Use --compact for single-line JSON and -o <file> to write to a file — both are global options that work before or after the command.

Exit codes make the CLI easy to use in scripts:

| Code | Meaning | | --- | --- | | 0 | Success (also --help / --version) | | 2 | Bad usage / invalid argument (nothing was sent) | | 4 | Not found (404 from the server) | | 6 | Network / transport failure (DNS, connection, timeout, size cap) | | 1 | Any other error — including a non-XML response (the feed returned the website's HTML shell) |

Troubleshooting

• command not found: bundesrat — the global npm bin directory isn't on your PATH. Run npm bin -g to find it and add it, or run via npx @maschinenlesbar.org/bundesrat-cli ….
• Exit 1 / "received an HTML page" — the feed returned the website's HTML shell instead of XML (it may have moved). The CLI already adds the required ?view=renderXml render parameter; if this persists, the upstream feed changed.
• Empty tops between sittings — outside an active sitting the agenda feed can be sparse: tops may be [] and session's title/header may be absent (both are optional), so guard for them in scripts.
• A field you expected is missing — the CLI surfaces only openly-licensed factual fields; the feeds' HTML detail/abstract bodies, biographies and images are stripped on purpose (see DATA_LICENSE.md).

Global options

Given before or after the command, e.g. bundesrat --compact session:

| Option | Description | | --- | --- | | -V, --version | Print the version number | | -h, --help | Show help for the program or a command | | --compact | Print JSON on a single line instead of pretty-printed | | -o, --output <file> | Write output to this file instead of stdout | | --base-url <url> | API base URL (default https://www.bundesrat.de) | | --timeout <ms> | Per-request timeout (default 30000) | | --user-agent <ua> | User-Agent header value | | --max-retries <n> | Retries for transient 429/503 responses (0..10, default 2) | | --max-response-bytes <n> | Cap response body size in bytes (0 = unlimited; default 100 MiB) |

Learn more

• SKILLS.md — Claude Code Agent Skills that drive this CLI.
• Usage.md — full use-case-driven cookbook.
• GLOSSARY.md — every domain term explained.
• DEVELOPING.md — TypeScript library usage, the XML parser, architecture, testing, CI.

Data license

This CLI is a client — it accesses data it does not own or redistribute. The upstream data is © the Bundesrat and licensed separately from this tool's code. See DATA_LICENSE.md.

Bundesrat — website content is copyright-protected (personal use only; commercial use / redistribution need permission), so cite "Quelle: Bundesrat" and don't republish editorial text or images without asking. The Drucksachen and Plenarprotokolle are amtliche Werke (§ 5 Abs. 2 UrhG) — free to reuse unaltered and with a source citation.

License

Dual-licensed — use it under either:

• AGPL-3.0-or-later (default, free). Note the AGPL's §13 network clause: if you run a modified version as a network service, you must offer that modified source to the service's users.
• Commercial license (paid), for closed-source / proprietary or SaaS use without the AGPL's obligations.

See LICENSING.md for details, and CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution policy (this project does not accept external code contributions). Commercial enquiries: [email protected].