coursera-cli

Your own Coursera courses, from the terminal — and from Claude Code, over MCP.

Downloads the transcripts and readings of courses you are enrolled in, through Coursera's internal API. No HTML scraping, no gigabytes of video.

coursera courses --search pricing     find the course
coursera map                          see what you actually studied
coursera transcript <slug>            pull the content as text

Install

Requires Bun.

cd klipso_reverse/Cli-propios/coursera-cli
bun install

Related MCP server: Coursera MCP

Session

The CLI needs your account's CAUTH cookie. It looks in three places, in order:

1. The COURSERA_CAUTH environment variable

2. Its own store, under the platform config directory

3. The store written by the Python recon repo (~/.config/coursera_recon/session.json)

If you have none, capture one with capture_session.py from the coursera_recon repo: it opens a visible Chromium, you log in by hand, and it saves the cookie. Logging in is not automated — typing credentials from a script is what triggers the CAPTCHA.

coursera session   # is it alive, where did it come from, how old is it
coursera doctor    # session + routes + paths, all at once

[OK]   version: coursera-cli 0.2.0 on win32, bun 1.3.11
[OK]   session-present: found via legacy, 108.2 h old
[OK]   session-alive: 215 courses visible
[OK]   endpoints: 10 routes declared, domains.v1 alive
[OK]   paths: state C:\Users\you\AppData\Local\coursera-cli

5/5 checks passed

Commands

Filters

Filters compose with AND, and multi-word values need no quotes:

coursera courses --search machine learning
coursera courses --level intermediate --domain data-science
coursera courses --lang es --hours 5          # short courses in Spanish
coursera courses --university duke

Global flags

Library map

coursera map cross-references your library against Coursera's own taxonomy:

215 courses in your library
levels: beginner 99   intermediate 66   advanced 7   undeclared 43
business                         158  ████████████████████████ 1366 h
data-science                      90  ██████████████            735 h
computer-science                  35  █████                     255 h

SPECIALIZATIONS (15)
  ✓ AI Product Management                            3/3  complete
  ○ Digital Product Management                       3/5  2 missing

Two caveats it prints itself, because both are real: a course filed under two branches counts in both, and hours come from Coursera's free-text workload field, which 78 of 215 courses do not state readably.

MCP for Claude Code

Register the server with the absolute path to the Bun binary — the process that launches MCP servers does not inherit your PATH, so "command": "bun" fails with "Failed to connect":

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "coursera": {
      "command": "C:/Users/you/.bun/bin/bun.exe",
      "args": ["C:/Users/you/klipso_reverse/Cli-propios/coursera-cli/src/mcp/index.ts"]
    }
  }
}

fetch_transcripts returns paths, not text: a course is ~130 KB (≈35k tokens) and sending it whole would blow up the conversation. To read, use read_transcript.

What it downloads

Text, by default: a .txt transcript per video and a .reading.md per reading. No video — a course is gigabytes as MP4 against ~130 KB as text, and for studying or summarizing the text carries the same signal.

Files are organized per module, numbered in order, with a manifest.json index.

Locked modules

When a course is in preview or has locked weeks, the aggregating API censors the item type: it returns them empty, and extractors that filter by type skip 75% of the syllabus believing it is empty.

This CLI does not filter. It asks the video and reading microservices about every item directly and keeps whatever answers.

Docs

Tests

bun test          # 76 tests against responses captured live from the API
bun run typecheck

Legal

Reaches your own account with your own session, for courses you are already enrolled in. Downloaded material is copyrighted by Coursera and its universities: it is for your personal study. Do not redistribute it.