Understanding Liferay's Command Line Tools
Liferay offers two command-line tools: Blade CLI and Liferay Cloud CLI. Clarity’s team plans to leverage both tools to support local and cloud-based development. Here, you’ll cover the uses and features of these tools in greater detail to understand how they can accelerate development for Clarity’s team.
Blade CLI
Blade CLI is a command line tool that facilitates Liferay workspace management as well as common development tasks. It streamlines everything from creating a Liferay workspace to deploying client extensions and plugins to local Liferay instances, simplifying these tasks into a few simple commands.
Though optional, Blade is recommended for managing Liferay workspaces as well as development on Liferay. When starting a Liferay project, common tasks include setting up a project repository, getting a local instance of Liferay to test locally, and starting up and shutting down the server in order to interact with the portal. You can accomplish these tasks with the following commands:
Blade removes the need to learn how to arrange Liferay workspace file structures, write bash scripts, and set up Tomcat servers, thus accelerating the speed at which developers can produce meaningful work.
As users start developing client extensions or plugins, Blade can use Gradle or Maven to deploy customizations to a local Liferay environment. Blade by default is set up to use Gradle when setting up a workspace, but the Maven technology can be specified as an argument. See Blade documentation or run blade help
for more instructions on using Maven over Gradle.
Liferay Cloud CLI
Liferay Cloud CLI is a command-line tool for viewing and managing Liferay Cloud services, specifically for PaaS and SaaS deployments. Using this tool, you can perform almost all management functions with just a few commands, including
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Project and Service Management
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Deployment and Updates
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Log Management
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Environment Management
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Domain Management
These are tasks that would otherwise require navigating the Liferay Cloud Console, Liferay’s browser-based cloud environment management UI. This is especially useful where access to a graphical user interface is limited.
In both PaaS and SaaS deployments, users receive extension environments for hosting client extensions, which you can then reference from your Liferay instances. Deploying client extensions to these environments requires the Liferay Cloud CLI tool. Though you’ll need to configure it to recognize your extension environments before deploying client extensions to them.
In PaaS deployments, Liferay Cloud CLI enables you to manage and monitor project services, such as the Liferay instance, database, or Elasticsearch. You can access logs and even the service's shell directly through the CLI. This streamlines common development tasks by providing quick access to essential service management functions. See Liferay Cloud CLI documentation for a comprehensive explanation of its features.
Conclusion
Liferay's command-line tools provide powerful ways to interact with your Liferay projects, whether you're working locally or in the cloud. Later modules will explore the Liferay Cloud CLI tool in greater detail. For now, you’ll explore the Blade CLI tool.
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