Exploring the Cloud CLI's Capabilities

Liferay Cloud CLI is a powerful command-line tool designed to streamline your interactions with Liferay PaaS and SaaS environments. This article explores the CLI's features, from managing projects and services to deploying client extensions and troubleshooting issues.

Primary Features

The Liferay Cloud CLI tool provides a comprehensive set of commands for managing your Liferay Cloud deployments. It works by interacting with Liferay Cloud environments through APIs; when you execute a command, the CLI constructs an API request based on your input. Liferay Cloud then processes the request and returns a response.

Key features include:

• Project and Service Management: List, view details, and manage your Liferay Cloud projects and services.
• Deployment and Updates: Deploy applications and updates to your environments.
• Cloud Backups: Run and manage environment backups.
• Log Management: Access logs for troubleshooting and monitoring.
• Shell Access: Access a service’s shell.

In these ways, the Liferay Cloud CLI simplifies many tasks that would otherwise require navigating the Liferay Cloud Console. This is particularly useful for automating repetitive actions or working in environments with limited GUI access.

Using Liferay Cloud CLI

After installing the Liferay Cloud CLI tool, you can run lcp --help to view all available commands. You can then run lcp login or any command requiring project access (e.g., lcp log) to trigger authentication. Once authenticated, you can execute any commands for project environments and services you can access.

When running environment and service commands, the CLI tool prompts you to identify a specific project environment and service. You can provide options and arguments in your commands if you already know the target environment or service ID.

Here's a look at some commonly used lcp commands.

Listing Projects and Services

To view all project services, run the lcp list command:

lcp list

The output includes each service’s image and status.

View the image and status of environment specific services:

lcp list -p <project>-<environment>

Check the image and status of a specific service:

lcp list -p <project>-<environment> --service <serviceID>

Alternatively, you can check a service by passing its full URL to lcp list:

lcp list --url <service>-<project>-<environment>.lfr.cloud

Deploying to Liferay Cloud Environments

Use the lcp deploy command to deploy either a specific service or all of your services to one of your environments:

lcp deploy

Running lcp deploy from the root directory of your repository deploys all applicable services to your chosen environment. Run the command from one service’s folder (with the service’s LCP.json file in that folder) to specifically deploy that service to the environment.

Run the command with -r to specify a remote (by its ID) other than the default:

lcp deploy -r <remote-id>

Accessing Service Logs

Use lcp log commands to display logs for specific projects, services, and instances.

View all service logs for a project environment:

lcp log -p <project>-<environment>

View logs for a single service in a project environment:

lcp log -p <project>-<environment> -s <service>

Alternatively, use a service’s full URL to view its logs:

lcp log --url <service>-<project>-<environment>.lfr.cloud

By default, the lcp log command only returns 10,000 lines to reduce network impact. However, you can avoid this restriction by using --since and --until parameters to specify a period of time (e.g., yesterday, "yesterday at 9pm", "10 minutes ago", "mm/dd/YYYY HH:mm:ss").

View all service logs for a project environment from a specific time to the present:

lcp log -p <project>-<environment> --since <start_time>

View all service logs for a project environment from a specific period of time:

lcp log --since "<start_time>" --until "<end_time>"

You can also pipe the output of an lcp log command into a file by appending >> "<new-file.txt>" to the end of the command. When run, the new file is created in your terminal’s current path.

lcp log -p <project>-<environment> -s <service> --since "<start_time>" --until "<end_time>" >> "<new-file.txt>"

Conclusion

Liferay Cloud CLI is a valuable tool for managing and interacting with your cloud deployments. Next, you’ll learn about how you can use Liferay’s developer tools in Liferay SaaS deployments.