Put all your organization CLI tools under one roof like gcloud or aws-cli for
easy distribution and exploration.
I'm working as a platform engineer in an organization and one of our jobs is creating various tools for developer teams. One of our important goals is to provide a self-service platform to dev teams. For that reason we're building various small or larger CLI tools, the dev teams can use. We observed 2 problems with our internal tooling:
- exploration
- distribution
In other words, quite often people weren't aware that some CLI tools exist. Also, dev teams must be using the latest version of tools and not some outdated versions. We set up an internal Homebrew repository we're using for distribution. But it didn't solve the exploration problem very well.
We like tools like gcloud or aws CLI. It's a massive CLI, where commands are
organized as groups and subcommands. Each group and subcommand have some description.
From an exploration perspective, this is working better than a bunch of isolated CLI
tools. This approach is also creating more consistent tooling and developer have
everything in one place.
But developing a monolithic massive CLI tool isn't something you want. Platform subsystems might be maintained by various teams which means the CLI will turn into a bottleneck, to which each team contributes. I wanted to avoid it by splitting subcommands into separated binaries with their lifecycle, own release process, and clear ownership.
To address these problems, I've created Toolbx.
Toolbx is installed on the developer's machine, it's syncing with Git command repository where are defined all command groups and subcommands hierarchically with metadata like description text etc. Toolbx isn't just a command definition. Toolbx also does the installation of subcommands as separated binaries. Thanks to this separation, each subcommand might have its repository, versioning, and lifecycle. If a new version of the subcommand is released, you have to only change it in the main command repository. When the developer executes the subcommand, and its older version, the Toolbx will update it.
Toolbx is simple binary and installation is easy. Toolbx currently provides binaries for the following:
- MacOS (64bit only)
- Linux
- Windows
Download appropriate version for your platform from Toolbx Releases.
Once it's downloaded, you will unarchive the toolbx binary. You don't need
to install the binary to some global location. The binary works well also from
any place.
But for easy to use you should move the toolbx binary somewhere in your PATH
(e.g. to /usr/local/bin).
After you installed toolbx binary, the second step is to configure it. All you need
is to execute .cofigure dot-command with a repository where are all command groups
and subcommands defined. You can use toolbx-demo
repository.
$ ./toolbx .configure -repository https://github.com/sn3d/toolbx-demo.git
Now you can start using toolbx. If you run the subcommand toolbx storage, you
should be synchronized with the command repository, and you should get
the list of all storage subcommands defined in demo repository.
$ toolbx storage
managing organization storage systems
Available sub-commands for storage
kafka - manage Kafka
postgres - manage PostgreSQL in organization
If you run a concrete subcommand, the toolbx will install binary for a subcommand,
for the current platform, execute the binary and pass the rest of the arguments.
$ toolbx storage kafka list 127 ↵
Installing storage-kafka (version:0.0.4 platform:darwin-amd64)...
organization.com Kafka clusters
cluster-1 [server1:9092 server2:9092]
cluster-2 [server3:9092 server4:9092 server5:9092]
In the output above you might see the toolbx is installing storage-kafka binary
for MacOS, it executes the binary, and pass the rest of the arguments. In this case,
it's list. The rest of the output is the subcommand's output.