What's Changed:
Cleaner terminal experience
- doctl now understands your terminal better — colour, width, and plain text when you’re piping or running in CI — so output stays readable whether you’re in a terminal or a script.
Clearer flag errors
- Missing or invalid flags are caught before the API is called, with plain-language messages and hints on what to fix.
Better waiting on long operations
- Commands that use --wait share one consistent progress style. There’s a timeout (default 30 minutes) so a wait can’t hang forever, and failed operations are reported as failures. Progress goes to stderr so piping still works.
Welcome when you run doctl
- Running doctl with no arguments shows a short welcome: version, account, team, context, and a few next steps — plus a note if a newer version is available. Use doctl --help for the full command list.
Safer auth config
- auth switch and auth remove no longer rewrite your whole config file. Environment tokens are no longer accidentally saved to disk.
- If you’ve used doctl in CI with DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS_TOKEN set, check your config file and rotate the token if it was saved there.
Clearer errors
- Failures now show a short title, why it failed, status when relevant, and a next step when one helps. Request IDs are included when the API provides them. Typos in nested commands (for example under compute) now exit with an error instead of looking like success.
Styled help
- --help uses a consistent, easier-to-scan layout across commands, with examples highlighted.
Note: This release updates doctl’s terminal experience only. It does not include OHS / agent commands or APIs; those remain on the separate beta build: v1.169.0-beta.1