Command Line Interface (CLI)

Overview

In Adobe ColdFusion (2016 release), there is a new Command Line Interface (CLI) for developers to run cfm scripts without starting the ColdFusion server.

You can use cf.bat to run cfm scripts for operations, such as:

Reporting, logging, or archiving of files.
Monitoring or debugging of databases.
Mailing an error log or thread dump to a system admin.

The cfm files can either be in wwwroot or in a different location.

Execution

You can pass parameters from command line to the cfm script that is being executed.

Path

The path to the CFM can be either absolute or relative. An absolute path sets the directory of the cfm as wwwroot. A relative path sets the current working directory as wwwroot.

Arguments

You can pass both positional and named arguments to the executing cfm from the command line.

CLI has the following methods to read the arguments:

cli.getArgs() - Gets all the arguments.
cli.getNamedArgs() - Gets all the named arguments.
cli.getUnnamedArgs() - Returns all the unnamed args as a CFML array or an empty array if none are specified.
cli.getArg(int index) - Gets the argument at the index location.
cli.getNamedArg(String argName) - Gets the value of the named argument with name argName.

Example

cf.bat test.cfm 10 20 foo=bar
cli.getArg(1) returns 10

cli.getArg(2) returns 20
cli.getNamedArg("foo") returns bar

Custom directories

In CLI, you can set outputdir and logdir while executing the cfm. By default, both classes and logs go to the temp folder.

Usage:

cf.bat cliscript.cfm –outputdir=c:\cfclasses –logdir=c:\logs

Application.cfc

The lookup for Application.cfc depends on the wwwroot, which is set according to the path of cfm (absolute or relative).

In Application.cfc, only onApplicationStart(), onApplicationStop(), and onError() methods are supported. There is no support for session and request methods in CLI.

Scopes

CLI supports the following scopes:

application
argument
request
this

Reading/writing in Command Line

Additionally, CLI supports three methods to read and write to stdin and stdout/stderr:

cli.read() - The read function reads one line from stdin.
cli.writeln(message) - The write function writes the message string to stdout.
cli.writeError(errorMessage) - The writeError function writes the error message string to stderr.

Example

readwrite.cfm
<cfset CLI.writeError("This is an error message from CLI writeError!")>
<cfset CLI.writeln("This is CLI write method!")>

Usage

cf.bat readwrite.cfm >> c:\logFile.txt 2>> c:\errFile.txt

Other supported features

CLI supports the following features:

Mail
Web service
Application data sources

Other functions

cli.exit(exitCode) - The exit function takes a status code and exits to the command prompt with the specified exit code.

Unsupported features

The following features are not supported with CLI:

Charting
Scheduled Tasks
PDF features
Document
REST
Solr
Flex Integration
DotNet Integration
WebSocket
Image Functions
API Manager