toolbx

Toolbx

Put all your organization CLI tools under one roof like gcloud or aws-cli for easy distribution and exploration.

Motivation

I'm working as platform engineer in organization and one of our jobs is creating various tools for developer teams. One of our important goals is to provide 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 wasn't aware that some CLI tools exist. Also, it's important that dev teams are using the latest version of tools and not some outdated versions. We setup internal Homebrew repository we're using for distribution. But it didn't solve exploration problem very well.

We like tools like gcloud or aws CLI. It's massive CLI, where commands are organized as groups and subcommands. Each group and subcommand have some description. From 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 on one place.

But developing monolithic massive CLI tool isn't something you want. Platform subsystems might be maintained by various teams which means the CLI will turn into bottleneck where each team contribute. I wanted to avoid it by splitting subcommands into separated binaries with own lifecycle, own release process and clear ownership.

To address these problems, I've created Toolbx.

Toolbx is installed on 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 command definition. Toolbx also do installation of subcommands as separated binaries. Thanks to this separation, each subcommand might have own repository, versioning, lifecycle. If new version of subcommand is released, you have to only change it in main command repository. When developer execute the subcommand, and it's older version, the toolbx will update it.

Installation

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).

Quick Start

When you installed toolbx binary, as second step is configuration of your command repository. It's repository where are all command groups and subcommands defined. You can use toolbx-demo repository:

$ echo "repository: https://github.com/sn3d/toolbx-demo.git" > ~/.toolbx.yaml

Now you can start using toolbx. If you run subcommand toolbx storage, you should be synchronized with command repository, and you should get the list of all storage subcommands defined in demo repository.

$ toolbx storage

managing organization storage systems

Available subcommands for storage

 kafka - manage Kafka
 postgres - manage PostgreSQL in organization

If you run concrete subcommand, the toolbx will install binary for subcommand, for 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 output above you might see the toolbx is installing storage-kafka binary for MacOS, execute the binary and pass the rest of the arguments, in this case it's list. The rest of the output is subcommand's output.