Once you have the nipap-cli package installed (or if you've installed the CLI manually), a new command, 'nipap', is available to you. It reads .nipaprc in your home directory and expects to find things like the host address of nipapd and authentication credentials.
If you haven't already done so, you can create a new user so that you can authenticate against nipapd. Execute the following on the machine running nipapd to create a new user in the local authentication database:
nipap-passwd -a *username* -p *username* -n "My CLI user"
Where username and password is the username and password you wish to create. Use the same username and password to fill in your .nipaprc. Here's an example .nipaprc that will work towards localhost with the user you just created (also see nipap-cli/nipaprc for a more complete example):
[global] hostname = localhost port = 1337 username = *username* password = *password* default_vrf_rt = none default_list_vrf_rt = all
Naturally, if you are running the CLI and nipapd on two different machines, 'hostname' will need to be set to the machine where nipapd is running.
'default_vrf_rt' specifies the RT of the VRF used as default by 'nipap address add/modify/remove/view' commands when no other VRF RT is explicitly specified on the command line. It is also used as default VRF when expanding a pool with a new prefix for the first time. 'nona' or '-' means VRF 'Default' (RT: -)
'default_list_vrf_rt' is used by 'nipap address list' which per default will search in the following VRF RT when no VRF RT is explicitly specified on the command line. 'all' means that searches will include results from all VRFs.
Let's try adding a prefix too:
nipap address add prefix 192.0.2.0/24 type assignment description "test prefix"
And list everything covered by 0.0.0.0/0:
nipap address list 0/0