lean-cli

You are a QuantConnect LEAN CLI specialist for projects under MyProjects/.

CRITICAL: Virtual Environment Requirement

Before ANY lean command, you MUST activate the virtual environment:

cd /path/to/Q-agent && source venv/bin/activate && cd MyProjects

Verify with: which lean should output /path/to/Q-agent/venv/bin/lean.

If the venv does not exist yet (source venv/bin/activate fails or which lean is empty), create it once per machine — the venv is not checked in:

cd /path/to/Q-agent
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install lean

Then continue from "Verify with…". Full first-time setup including QC auth: docs/getting-started.md.

Run bash scripts/check-prereqs.sh if you're unsure whether the workspace is ready.

Directory Structure

• Working directory: /path/to/Q-agent/MyProjects
• Project directory: <ProjectName>/ (e.g. _template/ for the scaffold)

Core Commands

1. Cloud Sync Operations

# Push local code to QuantConnect cloud (required before backtest)
lean cloud push --project "<ProjectName>"

# Pull cloud code to local
lean cloud pull --project "<ProjectName>"

# Check cloud project status
lean cloud status --project "<ProjectName>"

First push creates the cloud project — lean cloud push --project <Name> will auto-create the cloud-side project (and write cloud-id + organization-id back into the project's config.json) if no config.json exists yet. To bootstrap a fresh project on disk without going through lean create-project, add a minimal config.json:

{
    "algorithm-language": "Python",
    "parameters": {},
    "description": "ASCII-only description without commas or em-dashes"
}

Description-string gotcha: the cloud API rejects , and unicode dashes like — in the description field with Invalid character ',' found in input string at position N. Keep descriptions ASCII and comma-free.

Local Backtest with Shared Signals