Pakistan's electricity regulator publishes the country's only plant-level power data as Excel-exported HTML that reads as empty and PDFs nobody extracts — this turns it into a queryable panel and names every gap.
NEPRA is the sole public source for monthly plant-by-plant generation and per-distribution-company reliability in Pakistan, and there is no API, no dataset and no package for any of it. This CLI extracts those releases live from the published documents, keeps unreported months distinct from measured zeros, follows plants across years despite renamed rows and re-sorted row numbers, and surfaces the places the regulator's own documents disagree with themselves instead of quietly picking one.
Quick Start
# confirm the site is reachable before anything else; no credential is needed anywhere in this CLI
nepra-pp-cli doctor
# see which fiscal years actually exist upstream, and which are listed but unreachable
nepra-pp-cli sources --kind gen
# see every surface this CLI serves, how old each measurement is, and which command answers it; exits non-zero past the window so a cron can gate on it. Makes no request
nepra-pp-cli coverage --check-stale
# the plant-by-month grid for one fiscal year as rows
nepra-pp-cli gen --fy 2023-24 --agent
# prove the published bytes and the 32-column layout still match what this build expects. It is a FETCH gate, not a cache gate: nothing is stored locally
nepra-pp-cli verify --fy 2023-24
Unique Features
These capabilities aren't available in any other tool for this API.
The panel nobody else has
-
gen — Pull every power plant's monthly generation and utilisation for a fiscal year as rows you can pipe, with unreported months kept distinct from real zeros.
Reach for this when you need the whole fiscal year at plant granularity; it is the only machine-readable form of this table that exists.
nepra-pp-cli gen --fy 2023-24 --agent
-
fleet — Follow one plant or a listed operator's whole fleet across the fiscal years the crosswalk has observed, through renames and re-sorted row numbers.
Use this for any question spanning more than one fiscal year, and for mapping plants to listed operators. meta reports observed_fys against published_fys: the embedded crosswalk does not cover every published year, and the gap is stated rather than hidden.
nepra-pp-cli fleet --parent HUBC --agent
-
capacity — Installed and dependable capacity broken out by plant status and system, so each headline megawatt figure is labelled and derivable.
Use this when a capacity number has to reconcile; it shows which definition produces which total.
nepra-pp-cli capacity --as-of 2024-06-30 --by status --agent
Trust the number or don't
-
conflicts — List every place NEPRA's own published figures disagree — two sources on one key, an unexplained step inside a single series, or a row that fails its own arithmetic — showing both values and both citations without picking a winner.
Reach for this before quoting any NEPRA figure. --kind conflict is the two-source case; --kind break is a step inside one series (those entries carry same_key=false, because there is no second source to cite); --kind arithmetic is a row that contradicts itself. Default is all three.
nepra-pp-cli conflicts --surface per --agent
-
disco — Per-distribution-company transmission losses, recovery, interruption frequency and duration against the regulator's own targets, across report years.
Use this for any per-DISCO performance question; the national averages everyone quotes hide the spread.
nepra-pp-cli disco --metric saidi --fy 2024-25 --agent
-
verify — Assert every published NEPRA surface against status, byte floor, content checksum, in-document year token and the frozen column fingerprint, exiting non-zero when stale or drifted.
Use this before trusting any extract. It is a FETCH gate, not a cache gate — nothing is stored locally — and it catches the decoys this site serves under an HTTP 200.
nepra-pp-cli verify --fy 2023-24 --agent
Find the document
-
events — A dated feed of tariff determinations and orders by company, distribution company or docket, with the verbatim document link.
Use this to find which determination applies to a company and when; it returns document identity, not rates.
nepra-pp-cli events --surface ipp-thermal --docket TRF-71 --agent
-
licence — The licence register with gross capacity, plant type, fuel and the modification trail, searchable by name or fuel.
Reach for this for licensed-capacity and plant-type questions. Search by --search or --fuel; lookup by PSX ticker is refused with exit 2 because the crosswalk resolves only 28 of 335 register names, and fleet --parent is the right instrument for an operator's generation panel.
nepra-pp-cli licence --fuel Coal --agent
-
fca — The monthly requested-versus-allowed fuel cost adjustment series with cumulative disallowance, bounded to the window the source actually covers.
Use this to see how much of a requested fuel adjustment the regulator actually allowed, month by month.
nepra-pp-cli fca --entity cppag --cumulative --agent
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sources — Catalogue every reachable published document with size, coverage window, text-layer flag and reachability state, and diff it against the shipped manifest.
Use this to discover what exists before fetching, and to tell an unreachable document apart from one with no data.
nepra-pp-cli sources --kind per --agent
Recipes
One operator's fleet across every published year
nepra-pp-cli fleet --parent HUBC --agent
Follows a listed operator's plants through renames and re-sorted rows, narrowing the payload to the four fields an availability model needs.
Which distribution company misses its loss target by most
nepra-pp-cli disco --metric tnd --fy 2024-25 --agent
Returns actual reported losses alongside the level allowed in tariff and the breach, per company, which no published page tabulates together.
Check a figure is not contested before quoting it
nepra-pp-cli conflicts --surface per --agent
Lists same-key disagreements between two published documents with both citations, so a quoted number can be defended or avoided.
See which fiscal years and surfaces actually exist upstream
nepra-pp-cli sources --diff --agent
Diffs the live catalogue against the shipped manifest, separating genuinely unreachable documents from ones with no data.
Gate a published surface on bytes, decoys and the column fingerprint
nepra-pp-cli verify --fy 2023-24 --check-stale --agent
Emits a citable checksum manifest and exits non-zero if any artifact drifted or aged past its staleness window.
Known Gaps
Measured on this build. Each is a real limit, not a caveat about the upstream data.
disco provenance captions are garbled. Each row's citation.caption carries the table caption exactly as NEPRA's Performance Evaluation Report PDFs expose it, and that text layer splits words at arbitrary points — e.g. Table 0 6:SystemAverageInterruptionDur ationIndex(SAIDI ). This is verbatim provenance and is safe to cite as such, but it is not a clean label and should not be parsed. Use metric (saidi) or metric_title (System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI - Min)) for display, and citation.table + citation.page to locate the source.--max-age is accepted but does nothing. The flag is declared on the root command, but this CLI has no sync command for it to gate, so no staleness hint is ever emitted. Use coverage --check-stale [--stale-after <days>] for a staleness gate over every surface, or verify --check-stale for one surface family.
Usage
Run nepra-pp-cli --help for the full command reference and flag list.
Paths & environment variables
This CLI separates local files into four path kinds:
| Kind | Contents |
|---|
config | User-editable settings such as config.toml and saved profiles |
data | Durable local data such as data.db |
state | Runtime state such as persisted queries, jobs, and teach.log |
cache | Regenerable HTTP/cache files |
Each kind resolves independently. The ladder is:
- Per-kind env var:
NEPRA_CONFIG_DIR, NEPRA_DATA_DIR, NEPRA_STATE_DIR, or NEPRA_CACHE_DIR
--home <dir> for this invocationNEPRA_HOME for a flat relocated root- XDG env vars:
XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_STATE_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME
- Platform defaults matching existing installs
For containers and agent sandboxes, prefer a single relocated root:
export NEPRA_HOME=/srv/nepra
nepra-pp-cli doctor
Under NEPRA_HOME=/srv/nepra, the four dirs resolve to /srv/nepra/config, /srv/nepra/data, /srv/nepra/state, and /srv/nepra/cache.
MCP servers do not receive CLI flags from the host. Put relocation in the host env block:
{
"mcpServers": {
"nepra": {
"command": "nepra-pp-mcp",
"env": {
"NEPRA_HOME": "/srv/nepra"
}
}
}
}
Precedence matters in fleets: an ambient per-kind variable such as NEPRA_DATA_DIR overrides an explicit --home for that kind. Use NEPRA_HOME or the per-kind variables for durable fleet relocation; treat --home as the weaker per-invocation lever.
Relocation is one-way. Unsetting NEPRA_HOME does not move files back to platform defaults, and doctor cannot find files left under a former root. Move the files manually before unsetting relocation variables.
Existing installs keep working because the platform-default rung matches the legacy layout. Run nepra-pp-cli doctor --fail-on warn to check path warnings in automation.
Commands
events
Tariff determinations and Authority orders
nepra-pp-cli events - The determinations feed. REQUIRES gzip: without Accept-Encoding this page silently truncates under a 30 s timeout and returns a partial list under an HTTP 200.
fca
Fuel cost adjustment: monthly requested versus allowed, CPPA-G and K-Electric
nepra-pp-cli fca - The consolidated FCA table. Coverage is hard-bounded Jul-2018 to Jun-2022; negatives are written in accounting parentheses.
generation
Plant-level installed and dependable capacity with monthly generation and utilisation, per fiscal year
nepra-pp-cli generation index - The site's own generation index. INCOMPLETE — links 5 of the 7 reachable years; never use as the sole enumerator.nepra-pp-cli generation year - Fetch one fiscal year's generation workbook payload. windows-1252 encoded; the HTTP header declares no charset.nepra-pp-cli generation plants - One row per plant for a fiscal year: installed and dependable capacity, technology, fuel and status, filterable with --technology and --fuel. This is the route to capacity by fuel. No capacity factor or utilisation is emitted at any grain.nepra-pp-cli generation monthly - Twelve rows per plant for a fiscal year, with the same filters. Unfiltered it is byte-identical to gen --fy <year>.nepra-pp-cli coverage - The coverage ledger: all 104 surfaces this CLI can serve, the command that answers for each, and the age of every measurement. Makes no request. --check-stale exits 6 past the window.
hydel
Hydel generation and dependable capacity
nepra-pp-cli hydel - Hydel data. Dependable capacities are pinned upstream to 'July 2018 - June 2022'.
licence
Generation licence register: gross capacity, licence number, plant type, fuel, modification trail
nepra-pp-cli licence - The licence register accordion. Key lookup must be typo-aliased: the page misspells its own column as 'Gross Capacityy', hiding the largest entry.
quarterly
Quarterly data for ex-WAPDA DISCOs and K-Electric
nepra-pp-cli quarterly - Quarterly index. FROZEN upstream at 'April 2022- June 2022 (4th Quarter)' with 'Not Yet Issued' against every DISCO; nothing on the page says it is stale.
reliability
DISCO Performance Evaluation Reports: T&D losses against allowed target, recovery, SAIFI, SAIDI, complaints, safety
nepra-pp-cli reliability <path> - Fetch one Performance Evaluation Report PDF. Filenames are unconstructible across years — always scrape from sources, never build the path.
sir
State of Industry Report PDFs
nepra-pp-cli sir <year> - One State of Industry Report, returned as PDF bytes. Very large: 2025 is ~316 MB.
sro
SRO notifications
nepra-pp-cli sro - SRO notification index.
tariff
Per-distribution-company notified tariff pages
nepra-pp-cli tariff <disco> - One DISCO's tariff page. UTF-8 on this surface, unlike the generation workbooks. Rate schedules themselves are image-only PDFs and are NOT extractable.
Self-learning loop
This CLI caches per-question discovery so repeat queries skip the walk and structurally similar queries get answered via entity substitution. The loop also self-captures: every invocation is journaled locally, and failed-flag corrections plus fresh teaches surface as candidates on the next recall for confirm/reject judgment. Agents call recall before discovery and fire teach & after answering. See the ## Automatic learning section in SKILL.md for the full protocol.
nepra-pp-cli recall <query> - Look up cached resources for a query before running discoverynepra-pp-cli teach - Record a query -> resource mapping (silent on success, safe to background with &)nepra-pp-cli learnings list - Inspect taught rowsnepra-pp-cli learnings forget <query> - Undo a teachnepra-pp-cli learnings candidates - List auto-captured candidates awaiting confirm/rejectnepra-pp-cli learnings stats - Local loop metrics: recall hit rate, teach-to-reuse, playbook resolution, candidate countsnepra-pp-cli teach-pattern - Install a query/resource template up frontnepra-pp-cli teach-lookup - Add an entity mapping (e.g. country code, team alias) for pattern substitution
Pass --no-learn or set NEPRA_NO_LEARN=true to disable the loop for deterministic flows.
The local store's schema version stamp is one-way: once this version of nepra-pp-cli opens the database, older binaries refuse it with a version error — upgrade the binary rather than downgrading.
Output Formats
# Human-readable table (default in terminal, JSON when piped)
nepra-pp-cli events
# JSON for scripting and agents
nepra-pp-cli events --json
# Filter to specific fields by name
nepra-pp-cli events --json --select <field>[,<field>...]
# Dry run — show the request without sending
nepra-pp-cli events --dry-run
# Agent mode — JSON + compact + no prompts in one flag
nepra-pp-cli events --agent
Agent Usage
This CLI is designed for AI agent consumption:
- Non-interactive - never prompts, every input is a flag
- Pipeable -
--json output to stdout, errors to stderr
- Filterable -
--select <field>[,<field>...] returns only fields you need
- Previewable -
--dry-run shows the request without sending
- Read-only - this CLI has no write path to NEPRA at all. It does not create, update, delete, publish, send or mutate anything, and needs no credential
- Live-only - every data command reads the published documents on each invocation, or computes from an embedded catalogue. There is no sync command and no local NEPRA store;
--data-source local is refused rather than answered emptily
- Agent-safe by default - no colors or formatting unless
--human-friendly is set
- One envelope, two documented shapes - every command emits
{meta, results}. On the row-returning commands — capacity, coverage, events, fca, gen, hydel, licence, quarterly, sources and sro — results is a row array, so jq '.results[]' iterates rows on all of them alike. On the four report commands — verify, fleet, conflicts and disco — results is a keyed object of named sections (surfaces, operators, entries, report_years, …), because those commands report sections rather than a row list; iterate the section you want, e.g. jq '.results.surfaces[]'. No command nests a second envelope, and none emits a bare top-level array or object
meta always carries the command's own provenance. Where a generic transport claim disagrees with the command's measured origin — source: "live" meaning this run touched the network, versus source: "catalogue" meaning the answer came from an embedded catalogue — the command's origin wins and the transport claim is preserved at meta.envelope_meta rather than dropped. The two are different axes and are never collapsed.
Exit codes: 0 success, 1 a completeness assertion failed under --strict, 2 usage error, 3 not published, 5 API or parse error, 6 a staleness or fetch gate refused, 7 rate limited, 10 config error.
Health Check
nepra-pp-cli doctor
Verifies configuration and connectivity to nepra.org.pk. No credential is involved: this CLI has no auth.
Configuration
Run nepra-pp-cli doctor to see the resolved config, data, state, and cache directories. The platform-default config path is ~/.config/nepra-pp-cli/config.toml; --home, NEPRA_HOME, and per-kind env vars can relocate it.
Static request headers can be configured under headers; per-command header overrides take precedence.
Troubleshooting
Not published (exit code 3)
- This CLI has no resource IDs. Exit 3 means NEPRA does not publish what was asked for at the path this build knows — most often a fiscal year outside the reachable window.
- Run
nepra-pp-cli sources to see which documents are published, reachable or unavailable, and nepra-pp-cli coverage for the surfaces each command serves and how old each measurement is.
unpublished and empty are deliberately different findings: a year that exists and reports nothing returns rows, not exit 3.
API-specific
- A fiscal year returns no rows and no error — Run 'nepra-pp-cli sources --kind gen' — several years are listed by the site's own index but return 404, and are reported as unreachable rather than empty.
- Generation figures look like every month is zero — Unreported months are stored distinct from measured zeros. Pass --agent and read value_state; a blank month is absence of measurement, not zero output.
- A plant disappears between fiscal years — Row numbers are not stable across years and names drift. Use 'nepra-pp-cli fleet --plant' which resolves aliases, rather than joining on the row number.
- Two NEPRA documents give different values for the same metric — That is expected and recorded. Run 'nepra-pp-cli conflicts' to see both values with both citations; the CLI never reconciles them for you.
- A distribution company is missing from reliability output — The regulator excludes one company from these tables on the record, citing unreliable metering. It returns as unavailable with that reason rather than as an empty row.
Sources & Inspiration
This CLI was built by studying these projects and resources:
Generated by CLI Printing Press