1. A method comprising: receiving, by a processing device of a client system, a request to initialize an instance of a command line interface (CLI) installed on the client system; responsive to the request to initialize the instance of the CLI: requesting, by a CLI generator module executed by the processing device, an application programming interface (API) specification for a software application installed on a server system; receiving, by the CLI generator module, the API specification for the software application installed on the server system; parsing, by the CLI generator module, the API specification to identify one or more API methods associated with an API resource of the API specification; creating, by the CLI generator module, a command definition of the CLI corresponding to each API method by generating a corresponding CLI script fragment of a CLI script to map a command to each API method and associated one or more API parameters; and launching the instance of the CLI on the client system in view of the CLI script.