Archive for the ‘CLI’ Category

Wheels CLI matures to Version 1.0

Monday, June 20th, 2022

It’s hard to believe it took so long to get here but modern CFML development has come a long way thanks to tools like CommandBox and ForgeBox. The Wheels CLI is built as a CommandBox module and wouldn’t have even been possible without the support of the fine folks at Ortus Solutions.

The first commit to the repo for this project was committed back in July of 2016. It’s taken a while, that’s an understatement, to get here but Wheels itself jumped to 2.0, CommandBox matured, and we were able to put the plumbing in place to support the communication between the CLI and the running server. With nearly 300 commits in the repo, 25 commands in the CLI, and over 20 pages of documentation, it’s now time to take the alpha/beta label off send this baby out into the world.

Some of the more notable commands are wheels new to use our wizard to start a brand new project. With this command and the corresponding wheels generate app command, you can start a new Wheels project in a directory, specify the template to use, pick the CF engine to use, configure the datasource, and setup your reload password. In fact there’s a whole host of generate commands for every type of object you may want to create. There are a bunch of dbmigrate commands to interact with database migrations.

To install the CLI issue the following command:

box install cfwheels-cli

Don’t forget to check out the full CLI Commands section in the guides too.

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CFWheels DotEnvSettings Plugin published

Monday, June 6th, 2022

A new plugin was published to provide support for .env settings files in a production environment. This plugin is based on Eric Peterson’s CommandBox module and allows the use of .env or similarly named files to store your application secrets so they can be kept out of source control.

LICENSE

Apache License, Version 2.0.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

  • Lucee 5+
  • ColdFusion 9+
  • CFWheels 2+

Instructions

Just drop the zip file into your plugins folder and restart your application or use CommandBox cli to install. Simply type the following at the root of your project:

box install cfwheels-dotenvsettings

Usage

Create a .env file in your project root and add to .gitignore or your version control’s equivalent (don’t commit secrets to your repo!) The file can contain JSON or Java properties style key value pairs:

// property style
MY_SECRET_KEY=somevalue
MY_OTHER_SECRET=shh

// json style
{
  "MY_SECRET_KEY"="somevalue"
 ,"MY_OTHER_SECRET"="shh"
};

The default file name supported is .env but you can use any file name you want. You could even have multiple files for various environment.

In your CFWheels app you can read in your secrets by adding readDotEnvSettings() to your application. The most logical point to do this would be in your events\onApplicationStart.cfm file, but you could do it in your environment specific settings.cfm files as well. You can then access the secrets contained in the file processed using get("MY_SECRET_KEY").

If you want to customize the secrets file to use, you can specify the file name by passing in the file name like so readDotEnvSettings(".env-second").

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CFWheels Fully Embraces ForgeBox Packages

Friday, April 29th, 2022

As you may know, many years ago CFWheels embraced the distribution of Plugins via ForgeBox packages instead of maintaining our own directory. But the framework itself remains illusive. There was some work done in the last few months to put up packages for the framework but those packages were being maintained by hand which made them a show stopper for a long term solution.

Well, thanks to a new CI workflow based on GitHub Actions we now have the building and publishing of the packages fully automated. Giving credit where credit is due, the new workflow borrows heavily from the ColdBox workflow. It used GitHub Actions, Ant, and CommandBox to automate the process.

So what does all this mean for you, let’s cut to the chase. This means you can now install a fresh copy of the framework using the following command:

box install cfwheels-base-template

This will pull down a copy of the latest stable release of the template files and then pull down a copy of the latest stable release of the framework via package dependencies. In fact the CI workflow mentioned about publishes two packages cfwheels which is the core framework directory and cfwheels-base-template which is all the other files you need to scaffold the framework.

We’ve even backfilled all the prior released versions of the framework all the way back to version 1.0.0. So you can install a particular version of the framework using the following command:

box install [email protected]

In addition you can install the bleeding edge which includes all the work in process towards the next major release using:

box install cfwheels-base-template@be

And if you ever just need to get a copy of the latest framework files simply use the following command:

box install cfwheels

All this means that upgrading to a newer version of the framework should be much easier going forward. Frankly you should just need to modify the version of the dependency in the box.json file and issue a box update command. But we’ll document that more fully when we make our next release.

For now please feel free to play with all this package goodness and let us know if we fumbled anything.

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Starting a New CFWheels Project with the CLI

Thursday, March 24th, 2022

If you’re not using CommandBox for your CFWheels development, you’re in for a treat. This is a quick post to show case how easy it is to start a new CFWheels project with the help of the the wheels command for CommandBox.

If you have CommandBox installed and have the cfwheels-cli module installed, then simply launch CommandBox by typing box and then issue the command wheels generate app myApp . This simple command will take care of the following:

  • Create a folder in the current working directory for the project and name if myApp
  • Copy the cfwheels-template-base package from ForgeBox and expand it in the root of the myApp folder
  • Copy the cfwheels-core package from ForgeBox and expand it into the wheels folder in the root of the myApp folder
  • This command also takes care of naming your app myApp or whatever name you pass in

You may be asking yourself, what are all these packages you’re talking about? Well, we are starting to use the package management system provided by ForgeBox and CommandBox to make distribution of sample apps easier as well as installing and updating projects based on CFWheels. More to come on these topics later but this is just to whet your appetite.

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