This is a walkthrough for building plugins on the TIBCO Cloud™ CLI.

TIBCO Cloud™ CLI is an alternative interface that helps users to manage TIBCO Cloud resources, automate tasks, manage local dev environments (E.g.: Scaffolding), or can be a part of the CI/CD pipeline.

TIBCO Cloud CLI can be extended by building plugins. Plugins developed by TIBCO might address only generic use cases. However, there could also be some use cases that are specific to your requirement, in such cases, you can build your own plugin which then can be installed on the CLI by your users.&nbsp;

This how-to guide helps you to create a CLI plugin which can be installed on the TIBCO Cloud CLI.

Getting Started

For&nbsp;Linux and macOS, run below command on your terminal:

For&nbsp;Windows, run below command on your Windows PowerShell:

Run <code class="inline-code">tibco</code> command on the new terminal.

Create a default profile, so that you can interact with the TIBCO Cloud:

For in detail information on profiles, check the below link:

Setting up the CLI

This is the actual CLI you have downloaded and installed on your machine. The CLI is distributed as a tarball. This tarball contains some commands for managing plugins, plugin configurations, and CLI profiles.

CLI also keeps its own Node.js binary on which the code of the CLI is executed. This Node.js binary does not conflict with the Node.js that is installed on your machine.

Below are the links to know more about the commands that come OOTB from the Main CLI:

CLI commands can be grouped together as topics. Such a collection of topics can be bundled into plugins. These Plugins can be installed on the CLI at runtime by the user based on their requirement.

CLI plugins must have the CLI Core package as a dependency. This package provides some OOTB features that are necessary while building commands.

In this CLI, every command is a class. Flags and arguments are the properties of the command class. CLI core provides base command classes, these base commands provide some global flags that belong to all the commands of the CLI (For e.g: <code class="inline-code">--config</code>,<code class="inline-code"> --profile</code>, <code class="inline-code">--help</code>). It also provides classes and instances of other core modules that are shown in the above diagram.&nbsp;

We use multilevel inheritance for our command classes.

Config Module can be used to get or set properties from the configuration files. These files store configurations made by the user that are required for your plugin.

Request module can be used to make calls to Third-party tools and TIBCO Cloud using <code class="inline-code">HTTPRequest</code>class and <code class="inline-code">TCRequest</code> class respectively.

Profile module can be used when you need make any CRUD operations on CLI profile

UX module&nbsp; can be used to show prompts, spinners, progress bars, table on the terminal/cmd.

Logger can be use to log information, warnings, add debugging texts.

Secure store can be used to read and store confidential data of CLI profiles.

Error handling can be done on the CLI by throwing errors as an instance of <code class="inline-code">CLIBaseError</code> class. Doing this will not show stack traces on the terminal. One can see them by enabling a debugger.

CLI Components

Let's create a plugin for the CLI;&nbsp; this plugin will provide some utility features for the OpenAPI specifications. The&nbsp;OpenAPI&nbsp;Specification is a standard format to define the structure and syntax of REST APIs.

To access the docs of Oclif 1.x version, please download them from the zip file attached below. index.html is your starting point.

ocli-docs-1.18.zip

Let's keep the plugin name as <code class="inline-code">cli-plugin-oapiutils</code>.

You should see directory structure like below

README.md file for maintaining your plugin docs. bin folder has a run file. You can run your commands w/o attaching the plugin to the main CLI, however, this is not recommended. node_modules to maintain your dependencies. package.json file to keep all metadata of your plugin. src folder contains code for all of your commands. test folder maintains unit test files for the commands. tsconfig.json&nbsp;is required in case you are developing a plugin in typescript.&nbsp;

Let's check the contents of src folder.

Src folder has a <code class="inline-code">commands</code> folder, wherein <code class="inline-code">hello</code> command is created OOTB.

If everything has went well so far, you should see the below response.

Create plugin

Let's add a command to our OpenAPI utility plugin. This command will read the OpenAPI spec file from your disk and create its UI which can be viewed on the browser. Let's keep the command name as <code class="inline-code">view-api</code>. E.g.: <code class="inline-code">tibco oapiutils:view-api --file $HOME/myspec.json</code>

Here, <code class="inline-code">@tibco-software/cici-cli-core</code> package is necessary for every plugin. <code class="inline-code">express</code> and <code class="inline-code">swagger-ui-express</code> package is needed for this command.&nbsp;

Remove hello command as it was created OOTB. 

Create a new command named as <code class="inline-code">view-api</code>.

After running the above command, you might have noticed that the commands folder has a subfolder <code class="inline-code">oapiutils</code>. You should add all your commands under this folder. <code class="inline-code">oapiutils</code> is a group name(topics) under which all your commands reside.

Replace the code of <code class="inline-code">view-api.ts</code> with the below one.

Note that the above <code class="inline-code">OapiutilsViewApi</code>&nbsp;class is getting extended from <code class="inline-code">BaseCommand</code> class which is imported from <code class="inline-code">@tibco-software/cic-cli-core</code>. Since this command is extending from BaseCommand, also note that in the flag property of a command, we are copying the BaseCommand's flags too. (<code class="inline-code">...BaseCommand.flags</code> in code)

Download below OpenAPI spec file and provide its path as a input to the command.

link-example.json

In response, CLI should open the browser with the information of API.

Add command

So far we were running commands locally to test them. However, it is always recommended to test commands only by linking them to the main CLI. Let's do it for our OpenAPI utility plugin.

You should see response as&nbsp;<code class="inline-code">no plugins installed</code>.

So far we have three topics <code class="inline-code">config</code>, <code class="inline-code">plugins</code>, <code class="inline-code">profiles</code>.

Copy the path of a plugin folder where package.json file resides.&nbsp;

Now, in response you can see plugin is linked and under topics section&nbsp;<code class="inline-code">oapiutils</code> is added.

Now finally, you can run the command from the main CLI.

Link the Plugin

References

Building plugins for the TIBCO Cloud CLI is quite simple and straight. With this how-to guide, we just have scratched the surface of the CLI and its capabilities. There are more cool things that we can do over this CLI. You can explore all of them by going through the references provided in the previous section.

For any queries or feedback for the CLI and CLI Core raise it via the issues tab of the&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/TIBCOSoftware/cic-cli-main">TIBCO Cloud CLI</a>&nbsp;and <a href="https://github.com/TIBCOSoftware/cic-cli-core">CLI Core</a> respectively.

Build Plugins for TIBCO Cloud™ CLI

Varun Patil

Overview

Prerequisites

What you will learn