If you don’t like how clickhouse client and clickhouse-local display the prompt in your terminal window, it is possible to change it to add a prefix.
This article explains how to change the prompt to whatever you want.
The default prompt is your local computer name followed by :) :
The following are variables that you can use in a prompt: {user}, {host}
There are several ways to update the prompt and we’ll go through them each.
—prompt flag
The first way to change the flag is using the --prompt:
This will add the finger emoji before the smiley face:
Config file - top level
Alternatively, you can provide a prompt prefix in a config.xml file:
We can use a config file with any name we like and pass it in using the -C flag:
Prefer your config files to be in YAML?
That works too:
Config file - connections_credentials
Alternatively, you can specify a prompt per connection credentials.
This only makes sense when using clickhouse-client.
We can then try to connect with the dev connection:
Or the prod one:
And here’s a YAML version:
With the dev connnection:
And now prod:
Last modified on July 3, 2026
