Unity Command Line Launcher

A terminal command to open Unity projects quickly from the command line.

Supported Platforms

• macOS (tested with Sequoia 15.7.1)

Commands

Name	Description
open [path]	Opens the Unity project.
open	Shows a selection prompt of recent projects from the Unity Hub.
install <version>	Installs the Editor by version, fetching the revision, if necessary.
editor-revision <version>	Fetches the revision from Unity's API.
editor-path <version>	Gets the installation directory of the Editor, if installed.
project-version <path>	Gets the Unity version information from a project.

path can be a ProjectVersion.txt file or a directory (searches up and down for projects). If a directory contains multiple Unity projects, an interactive prompt will request a single selection.

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Setup

1. Download the binaries from the releases page or clone the repository.
2. When building from source run dotnet publish to publish a binary for your current platform.
3. Create an alias in your shell config (.zshrc, .bashrc, etc.):

echo 'alias unity="~/UnityCommandLineLauncher/dotnet/ucll/bin/Release/osx-arm64/publish/ucll"' >> ~/.zshrc

Or add the binary location to your PATH variable.

export PATH=$PATH:~/UnityCommandLineLauncher/dotnet/ucll/bin/Release/osx-arm64/publish/

Enhanced Fuzzy Search (Optional)

Install fzf:

brew install fzf

With fzf installed, the interactive project selection (unity open) will use enhanced matching:

• Acronyms: cfp finds "core-frontend-platform"
• Typo tolerance: sigle-sign finds "single-sign-on"

If fzf is not installed, the built-in search will be used as a fallback.

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Usage

Discover available commands and options:

unity --help

Show more info about a command:

unity open --help

Forward additional arguments to Unity Hub/Editor by separating them with a --:

unity open path/to/project -- -batchmode -quit

unity install 2022.3.10f1 -- --module webgl

Features

• Opens Unity projects from the terminal (faster than using the Unity Hub GUI)
• Interactive project selection from Unity Hub's recent projects (optional favorites filter)
• Detects Unity Editor version from projects
• Installs missing Unity Editor versions via Unity Hub
• Fetches changeset info from Unity API when missing in ProjectVersion.txt (e.g. legacy projects)
• Forwards additional Unity CLI arguments (e.g. -batchmode -quit)
• Auto-detects Unity Hub and Editor installation paths

Configuration

Unity Hub and Editor installations are detected in the following order:

1. Environment variables (optional, see table below)
2. Default paths on platform
3. Search heuristic to guess the paths

Environment variables are optional but speed up execution for non-default installations.

Platform	Environment Variable Example
macOS	UNITY_EDITOR_PATH="/Applications/Unity/Hub/Editor/{0}/Unity.app/Contents/MacOS/Unity"
	UNITY_HUB_PATH="/Applications/Unity Hub.app/Contents/MacOS/Unity Hub"
Windows	UNITY_EDITOR_PATH="C:\Program Files\Unity\Hub\Editor\{0}\Editor\Unity.exe"
	UNITY_HUB_PATH="C:\Program Files\Unity Hub\Unity Hub.exe"
Linux	UNITY_EDITOR_PATH="/home/<user>/Unity/Hub/Editor/{0}/Editor/Unity"
	UNITY_HUB_PATH="/home/<user>/Applications/Unity Hub.AppImage"

The placeholder {0} is part of the path pattern and will be replaced with the Editor version at runtime.

Design Background

Problems

• Unity Hub is slow to open and requires manual project management
• GUI-based workflows are cumbersome for multiple projects
• Unity Hub CLI has limitations: requires hardcoded paths, needs changeset info for installations, requires architecture detection on macOS

Solutions

• Terminal access is faster (global hotkeys, IDE integration, Finder context menu)
• This tool streamlines the Unity Hub API with a better UX

Development

This repository contains multiple implementations. The dotnet version is officially supported. The additional experiments can be used as a reference or to copy-paste into your own projects.

See the Developer Readme for .NET development.

Future

If the tool receives enough stars/forks, I'll publish it to Homebrew and similar package managers.