bidsmith refresh

refresh pulls the live Google Ads account and writes its current state as fmt-canonical .bid files. It’s how you adopt bidsmith without rewriting your existing account by hand, and how you re-sync after somebody edits the UI directly.

Today’s refresh is bootstrap-mode — it writes a clean snapshot of the live account. The future “reconcile-mode” (update specific fields in an existing .bid without overwriting unrelated blocks) is on the roadmap.

Synopsis

bidsmith refresh [--output FILE | --dir DIR] [--include-removed] [--verbose]

Flags

Flag	Description
-o, --output FILE	Write everything to a single .bid file. Mutually exclusive with --dir.
-d, --dir DIR	Split the output: <DIR>/account.bid for account-scoped resources, <DIR>/campaigns.bid for everything campaign-scoped. Mutually exclusive with --output.
--include-removed	Include resources whose status is REMOVED. Default: drop them.
--verbose	Print the outgoing API request envelope and raw response.

If neither -o nor -d is given, output goes to stdout.

Environment variables

Same as bidsmith plan.

Exit codes

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

Examples

Print the account to stdout

bidsmith refresh

Dumps the current state as a single block of .bid text. Useful for piping into another tool or eyeballing what’s there.

Write to one file

bidsmith refresh -o reality.bid

Single file with everything. Works well for small accounts.

Split into account- and campaign-scoped files

bidsmith refresh -d ads-bid/

Creates two files:

• ads-bid/account.bid — the provider block, conversion actions, shared sets, call assets, customer assets.
• ads-bid/campaigns.bid — campaigns, budgets, ad groups, ads, ad-group and campaign criteria.

This is the recommended pattern for accounts with more than a handful of campaigns.

Capture drift before fixing it

bidsmith refresh -o reality.bid
git diff reality.bid summer-2026.bid

git diff shows you exactly what’s different between the live account and your .bid files. The output of refresh is the same canonical form fmt produces, so the diff is meaningful and minimal.

Tip

After running refresh, the new .bid files are clean snapshots — bidsmith doesn’t try to merge them with anything that’s already there. For an existing project, write to a separate file (or a separate directory) first, then compare and selectively copy changes back into your real .bid files. The reconcile-in-place mode that does this automatically is on the roadmap.

What gets pulled

Every resource type bidsmith currently understands (see the Resource reference for the full list). Internally, refresh uses the same SearchStream queries plan does — so anything plan sees as live state, refresh can capture.

What doesn’t get pulled

• Performance data — bidsmith manages configuration only.
• Resources outside the supported schema — types not yet modeled in src/schema.rs are silently ignored. The roadmap tracks resource-type coverage.

See also

• bidsmith pull — same data, raw API JSON instead of .bid format.
• Drift — what to do after refresh shows differences.
• Your first 10 minutes — refresh in the onboarding context.