Extending the Command-Line Tool

Routr's command-line tool (CTL) is a powerful tool that lets you manage your Routr Connect server. Our team built the CTL with Oclif, a framework for creating command-line tools in Node.js.

You can extend the CTL by creating plugins with Oclif. This section guides you on how to extend the CTL with plugins.

Installing the Command-Line Tool

The CTL comes as an npm package. To install it, you run the following command:

npm install --location=global @routr/ctl

Using the Command-Line Tool

The CTL includes all the commands you need to interact with your Routr Connect server. Most commands follow a CRUD pattern. For managing your Agents, for instance, you have to create, delete, describe, and get commands.

Most commands adopt the {substantive} {verb} pattern. For instance, rctl agents get retrieves a list of agents.

If you want to extend the CTL, you create a plugin. Since developers built the CTL with Oclif, you can use the same framework to develop new plugins.

Creating a plugin

To create a new plugin, you start by running the following command:

npx oclif generate mycommand

The system will prompt you for some information about your plugin. For this example, let's choose mycommand as the name.

In your mycommand directory, you'll find the following structure:

[Directory structure omitted for brevity]

Looking at the src/commands/hello/index.ts file, you see the following code:

[Sample TypeScript code omitted for brevity]

This code defines a simple command that takes two arguments, person and from, and then prints a greeting to the console.

After you update your plugin, you install and test it by running the following command from within the plugin directory:

rctl plugins link . # Installing in development mode

For production mode installation of your plugin, you use the following command:

rctl plugins install .

If you have published your plugin to NPM, you can install it with this command:

rctl plugins install mycommand

To see your new command in action, you run the command with the --help flag and follow the instructions.

With this example, you see how straightforward it is to create a new command. You can use the same pattern to create commands for Routr Connect and even utilize the Node.js SDK to interact with the server.