Pray CLI

Prayers in your terminal: for a quiet moment with the Lord between builds, or a prayer to St. Carlo Acutis logged before tonight’s deploy.

Try

Install

With Go 1.25 or newer, run:

go install github.com/jamesmagoo/pray-cli/cmd/pray@latest

This puts pray in $(go env GOPATH)/bin, so make sure that folder is on your PATH.

Or build it from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/jamesmagoo/pray-cli
cd pray-cli
just install        # or: go install ./cmd/pray

How to pray

Type pray and the name of a prayer.

$ pray hail mary

Hail Mary

Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

You needn’t know the exact name. A nickname, a word from the title, or the start of a word will do.

pray ave: a nickname for the Hail Mary
pray carlo: the Prayer of Intercession for Technical Problems
pray saint carlo: “saint”, “st” and “st.” all work
pray acut: the start of a word is enough

If what you type could mean more than one prayer, pray lists them so you can be more specific.

To pray for someone or something, add --for and your intention.

$ pray hail mary --for "my mum"

Hail Mary

For my mum

Hail Mary, full of grace,
…

The intention is named before the prayer, as you would say it aloud. Some prayers have a place for it in their text: the St. Carlo prayer asks for help “specifically for the server migration”.

For Latin, add --lang la.

$ pray hail mary --lang la

Ave Maria

Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
…

A prayer that hasn’t been translated yet comes in English.

To put a prayer on your clipboard, use pray copy.

$ pray copy carlo --for "the release"

Copied Prayer of Intercession for Technical Problems to the clipboard

It copies plain text, ready to paste into a message, a document or a commit. On Linux it needs xclip, xsel or wl-clipboard.

In a script, pipe or redirect it like any other command.

#!/bin/sh
pray carlo --for "tonight's deploy" >> deploy.log
./deploy.sh

When its output isn’t a terminal, pray always writes plain text, so it’s safe to log.

Options

`--for "<intention>"`	Pray for someone or something
`--lang <code>`	Language: en (the default) or la
`--tag <tag>`	With pray list: only prayers with this tag, such as marian
`-h, --help`	Help for pray or any command, such as pray copy --help

The prayers

Every prayer pray knows, as it prints them. pray list shows the same in your terminal.

Hail Mary

Ave Maria

Pray it with: pray hail-mary or pray ave, pray ave maria
In: English, Latin
Tagged: marian, rosary

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.

Amen.

Our Father

Pater Noster

Pray it with: pray our-father or pray pater noster, pray lords prayer, pray the lords prayer
In: English, Latin
Tagged: rosary, scripture

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Amen.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra.

Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo.

Amen.

Prayer of Intercession for Technical Problems

Pray it with: pray st-carlo-acutis or pray carlo, pray carlo acutis, pray st carlo, pray tech
In: English
Tagged: saints, work

Almighty and eternal God, you created us in your image, and you bid us seek all that is good and true and beautiful, fully manifest only in the divine person of your only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

You have inspired your servant, St. Carlo Acutis, to seek Your goodness, to proclaim Your truth, and to portray Your beauty through technology.

I humbly ask your servant's prayers, that I too may lead others to you through technology.

I humbly ask, through the intercession of St. Carlo, that you grant me clarity and patience in my technological work, specifically for the work before me.

Enlighten my understanding and direct my hands in every design and in every line of code, that my work may always serve your greater glory and benefit those who will use what I create.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

The underlined words are the prayer’s own intention. --for puts yours in their place.

Still to come

A rosary mode, more prayers and more languages are on the way, and your contributions are welcome. A prayer is a folder of plain text in internal/prayers/data:

hail-mary/
  meta.yaml   aliases, tags and a default intention
  en.md       "# Title", a blank line, then the text
  la.md       other languages alongside, named by language code

Add one, run just test to check it can be found and has everything it needs, and open a pull request on GitHub. This site reads the same files, so the prayer appears here too.