ctx members

ctx members prints everyone with access to the current repo — email, role and join date — and ctx members remove takes that access away.

When you’d reach for it

Before you push anything you’d rather not share, and whenever someone leaves the team. It answers “who can pull this knowledge base”, which is not the same question as “who has pushed to it” — for that, see ctx activity.

There is no ctx members add. Membership is only granted by redeeming an invite key (ctx invite → ctx join), and there is no CLI command to change someone’s role either: join always grants member, and owner comes from creating or claiming the repo.

Synopsis

ctx members
ctx members remove <email>

Flags

ctx members takes no flags.

Flag	Type	Default	Description
--root	string	—	project root directory (default: current directory)

Roles

Only two exist.

Role	Can do
owner	Everything a member can, plus mint / list / revoke invite keys and remove members.
member	Push and pull pages, read pages, list members, view the activity feed.

An owner row is written when a repo is created — including the implicit creation that happens on the first ctx push to a repo id the server has never seen — or when someone claims an existing repo that has no owner yet. Every other path in makes you a member.

Examples

List everyone with access:

ctx members

ctx members

no members

Note

no members is not the same as “you have no access”. The capture above is a server reached with the deprecated shared --api-key: legacy shared-key auth skips the membership check entirely and never writes a membership row, so a repo only ever touched that way has nothing to list. Sign in with a personal access token or the browser flow (ctx login) and the real roster appears.

Offboard someone (owner only):

ctx members remove alice@example.com

ctx members remove

Removes one person from the current repo.

ctx members remove <email>

ctx members remove takes no flags.

The argument is an email, matched case-insensitively against the member list. That’s a convenience: the server’s API works in user ids, so the CLI fetches the member list first and resolves the email locally. If the email isn’t in the list you get a local error and no request is sent at all.

On success it prints removed <email>.

Caution

Removal revokes future server access only. Pages the person already pulled are still sitting in their .contexo/ directory, and any personal access token they hold keeps working for the repos they’re still a member of. If the pages were sensitive, treat them as disclosed.

How it works

Both forms read .contexo/config.json and the stored credentials, then call your configured server. Nothing is written locally; no git commit is made.

• list → GET /v1/repos/<repo_id>/members. Any member of the repo may call it. Rows come from the server’s SQLite contexo.db (the membership table joined to the users table for emails), ordered oldest-join-first — so the original owner is normally the first line. The CLI aligns them into email role joined YYYY-MM-DD, with the date rendered in UTC.
• remove → GET …/members to resolve the email, then DELETE /v1/repos/<repo_id>/members/<userId>. The server requires the caller to be an owner, and refuses to delete the last remaining owner. Deleting a membership row does not touch the repo’s git history: pages that person pushed stay, and their name stays on those commits.

Common errors

Message	What happened
members: not authenticated — run 'ctx login' first	No credentials in this project. See ctx login.
members: server URL not set — run 'ctx remote set <url>' first	Config has no server. See ctx remote.
members: repo id not set — run 'ctx remote set-repo <id>' first	The project isn’t pointed at a repo yet.
no member with email "alice@example.com" on this repo	Raised locally after the lookup — check the spelling against ctx members.
only an owner can remove members	The server answered 403. You have the member role.
not a member of this repo	The server answered 404 — the id resolved from the email is no longer a member (someone else removed them first).
can't remove the last owner	The server answered 409. There is no API route around it — see the caution below.

Caution

The last-owner rule has a sharp edge. No route anywhere in the server changes an existing member’s role, and asking to create a repo that already has an owner is refused with repo already exists, so a repo can never gain a second owner. Whoever creates it — or first pushes to it, or claims it while it has no owner — is its owner permanently. On a self-hosted server, editing contexo.db is the only way out.

See also

• ctx invite — mint the key that lets someone in
• ctx join — what the teammate runs
• ctx activity — what members have pushed and pulled
• Teams guide — the full onboarding and offboarding flow