---
title: Getting Started | Developer Documentation
description: Install LiteParse and parse your first document in under a minute.
---

## Installation

Install LiteParse globally via npm to use the `lit` command anywhere:

Terminal window

```
npm i -g @llamaindex/liteparse
```

For macOS and Linux users, LiteParse can be also installed via `brew`:

Terminal window

```
brew tap run-llama/liteparse
brew install llamaindex-liteparse
```

## Quick start

Once installed, you can start parsing from the command line:

Terminal window

```
# Parse a PDF and print text to stdout
lit parse document.pdf


# Save output to a file
lit parse document.pdf -o output.txt


# Get structured JSON with bounding boxes
lit parse document.pdf --format json -o output.json


# Parse only specific pages
lit parse document.pdf --target-pages "1-5,10,15-20"
```

### Batch parsing

Parse an entire directory of documents at once:

Terminal window

```
lit batch-parse ./pdfs ./outputs
```

### Screenshots

Generate page images from a PDF for LLM agents or visual workflows:

Terminal window

```
lit screenshot document.pdf -o ./screenshots
```

## Next steps

- [Library usage](/liteparse/guides/library-usage/index.md): Use LiteParse programmatically from TypeScript or Python.
- [OCR configuration](/liteparse/guides/ocr/index.md): Configure Tesseract, use an external OCR server, or bring your own.
- [Multi-format support](/liteparse/guides/multi-format/index.md): Parse DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, images, and more.
- [Agent skill](/liteparse/guides/agent-skill/index.md): Add LiteParse as a skill for coding agents.
- [CLI reference](/liteparse/cli-reference/index.md): Complete command and option reference.