3.3. What is the IPA help

The IPA help is a built-in documentation system for the IdM server.

The IPA command-line interface (CLI) generates available help topics from loaded IdM plugin modules. To use the IPA help utility, you must:

Entering the ipa help command without options displays information about basic help usage and the most common command examples.

You can use the following options for different ipa help use cases:

$ ipa help [TOPIC | COMMAND | topics | commands]

[] — Brackets mean that all parameters are optional and you can write just ipa help and the command will be executed.
| — The pipe character means or. Therefore, you can specify a TOPIC, a COMMAND, or topics, or commands, with the basic ipa help command:
- topics — You can run the command ipa help topics to display a list of topics that are covered by the IPA help, such as user, cert, server and many others.
- TOPIC — The TOPIC with capital letters is a variable. Therefore, you can specify a particular topic, for example, ipa help user.
- commands — You can enter the command ipa help commands to display a list of commands which are covered by the IPA help, for example, user-add, ca-enable, server-show and many others.
- COMMAND — The COMMAND with capital letters is a variable. Therefore, you can specify a particular command, for example, ipa help user-add.