bidsmith pull

pull dumps the live Google Ads account as the raw JSON Google’s API returns. Unlike refresh, the output is not .bid text — it’s the API payload, suitable as a test fixture, an input to export, or just a debugging snapshot.

If you want .bid files, use refresh. If you want raw JSON, use pull.

Synopsis

bidsmith pull [--output FILE] [--verbose]

Flags

Flag	Description
`-o`, `--output FILE`	Write to a file. Defaults to stdout.
`--verbose`	Print the outgoing API request envelope.

Environment variables

Same as bidsmith plan.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
`0`	Successful pull.
`1`	Authentication failure, API error, file write error, or other.

Examples

Dump the account to a file

bidsmith pull -o dump.json

Writes a JSON array of API response batches. The shape matches what export --from-gads-search-response consumes — the pair round-trips an account through bidsmith’s renderer.

Pipe through another tool

bidsmith pull | jq '.[].results | length'

Useful for ad-hoc inspection. pull writes well-formed JSON to stdout when -o is absent.

Capture a snapshot for fixtures

bidsmith pull -o tests/fixtures/account-2026-05-21.json

The file is suitable as a regression-test input for offline rendering — export --from-gads-search-response tests/fixtures/account-2026-05-21.json should always produce the same .bid.

What’s in the output

A JSON array of “batches” — each batch is one response from a SearchStream call. Inside each batch, results is an array of resource records, each carrying the Google Ads resource name (customers/.../campaigns/...), the requested fields, and any nested objects.

This is the same data plan --read-live fetches; pull differs only in that it serializes the raw bytes to disk instead of adapting them into bidsmith’s internal types.