Basic Commands and Options

Cloudmesh contains a number of commands that makes the management of multiple heterogeneous clouds easier. The commands are defined in an uniform fashion and use for many some convenient built in options and behaviors. We describe them next. As they are general to many commands we have not described them in detail for each command that utilize them. You can check with the command manual pages for more details for each command.

Format

Many commands have a –format parameter that allows to provide output of the command in various formats. These formats include:

• json
• yaml
• table
• csv

The format can be changed on each command that supports it with:

--format FORMAT

where FORMAT is one of the values from the list above. In many cases the default format is set to table.

Cloud

Many commands are specific to a particular cloud. this cloud can be set with the

--cloud CLOUD

option for individual commands that support it. As we often execute multiple commands on the same cloud consecutively, will be inconvenient to specify the name of the cloud every time, thus we have introduced the concept of a default cloud. The default cloud can be set with the command:

default cloud=CLOUDNAME

where CLOUDNAME is the name of the cloud that we use

Help

To see the list of all available commands use the command:

help

The commands are sorted by topic, while the first list gives all commands in alphabetical order. To obtain an individual man page simply say:

help COMMAND

where command is the command you which to get the help message for. To obtain the manual pages of all commands yo can use the command:

man

which will print all man pages out.

Shell & Commandline

Cloudmesh client is a shell as well as a commandline tool. Thus all commands that you can type in as a single command could also be executed as a command shell. To enter the command shell, please type:

cm

+=======================================================+
.   ____ _                 _                     _      .
.  / ___| | ___  _   _  __| |_ __ ___   ___  ___| |__   .
. | |   | |/ _ \| | | |/ _` | '_ ` _ \ / _ \/ __| '_ \  .
. | |___| | (_) | |_| | (_| | | | | | |  __/\__ \ | | | .
.  \____|_|\___/ \__,_|\__,_|_| |_| |_|\___||___/_| |_| .
+=======================================================+
               Cloudmesh Shell

cm>

You will see the prompt and can interactively execute some of the commands without needing to type in cm in front of each command. To see the commands type help. To get help for an individual command type help COMMANDNAME. You can quit the command shell with the command quit.

The current list of commands contains:

cm help

Documented commands (type help <command>):
==========================================
EOF      comet    h          launcher  pause     reservation  ssh     verbose
akey     context  help       limits    portal    reset        submit  version
banner   debug    history    list      py        rsync        sync    vm
check    default  hpc        load      q         secgroup     test    workflow
clear    echo     image      man       quit      select       timer
cloud    exec     info       network   quota     server       usage
cluster  flavor   inventory  nova      refresh   shell        var
color    group    key        open      register  sleep        vc

Undocumented commands:
======================
shell_exec

Shell Commands
==============
banner  color  echo  help     load  man   pause  q     refresh  var
clear   debug  EOF   history  man   open  puase  quit  timer    version

System Commands
===============
hpc  rsync  submit  sync

Comet Commands
==============
comet

Security Commands
=================
key  secgroup  ssh

Cloud Commands
==============
cloud    flavor  image  limits  network  portal  register  select  test   vm
default  group   info   list    nova     quota   reset     server  usage

The manual page of the cm command can be found at: register

Elementary Commands

We have build in some convenience commands into the shell that include comments and execution of cm scripts.

Comments

Comments are identified by the first characters in a command line. We allow the following comment character identification strings:

#
/*
//

If comments are to be done over multiple lines in a cloudmesh script, they have to be done for each line at the very beginning. If a space or other character is in front of a comment string, then it will not be considered as a comment.

Cloudmesh File Execution

Multiple cloudmesh commands can be placed in a single cloudmesh script file. We recommend that you use the ending .cm. You can start the execution of such a file with:

cm filename.cm

A cloudmesh file could itself include references to other cloudmesh files. They can be started in one of two ways. You can use the exec command:

$ cm
cm> exec filename.cm

or you can use simply the filename. Cloudmesh will check if the filename exists and than execute it:

$ cm
cm> filename.cm

Python

You can execute a python command as follows:

py COMMAND

where command is the command you like to execute

Quitting the shell

To quit the shell you can use either the commands:

q

quit

EOF

Manual Pages

Often you will run in the situation where you may have to create a list of manual pages for your commands. To simplify that we have not provided this in Unix Man format, but simply in RST format. You can type in the command:

man

and it will print you in RST format a list of all commands available to you for your cmd3 shell. This naturally you could put into a sphinx documentation to create a nice user manual for your users automatically. IN fact we use this feature to create our manual pages.

The manual page of the man command can be found at: register

Scripts

Cloudmesh can easily execute multiple cloudmesh commands that are stored in cloudmesh script files. TO do so we recommend to place them in a file ending with .cm. Let us assume we call the file test.cm.

Now we can simply execute the script with:

cm test.cm

you can also cat the file with:

cat test.cm | cm

Variables

Cloudmesh client contains the ability to use variables within the shell. Variables are preserved between calls to cm. To see a list of all variables, use the command:

var list

To set variable values you can use:

var name=value

which will set the variable with the given name to the specified value. In case the value specifies an entry in the cloudmesh.yaml file it will be read from it and put into the named variable. For example the command:

var username=cloudmesh.profile.user

Will create a variable username and get the value form the yaml file specified by its object hierarchy.

To use the content of the variable, simple use it on the shell with a dollar sign such as:

banner $name

In this example a banner will be created that contains the value of the variable name. Note that the variables $date and $time are predefined and give the current date and time and are updated at the time they are called.

As cm can also be used in a terminal, many terminal use a $ to indicate variables for this terminal/shell. In order to mask this you will need to use the ‘ ‘ or the `` sign:

banner '$name'

banner \$name

will result in the ability to ue the cloudmesh shell variables. If you However want to use the terminal shell variables such as $HOME you can access them directly:

banner $HOME

Special syntax detection of variables allow also easy use of operating system/terminal variables while prepending them with os. Thus:

banner $HOME

Furthermore variables defined in the cloudmesh yaml file can be directly accessed while using the . notation. Thus:

banner $cloudmesh.profile.username

Will print a banner with the username being myusername as defined in the yaml hierarchy under given this example:

cloudmesh:
  profile:
    user: myusername

To show the usage of the different variables in one line, please review the following example:

var a=hello
banner '$a-[0-100] $HOME $cloudmesh.profile.username'

This will print, where albert is your username:

######################################################################
# hallo-[0-100] /Users/albert albert
######################################################################

The manual page of the var command can be found at: register

Timers

Sometimes it is a good idea to measure the time it takes to execute a particular command. For this reason we have a timer command that can switch on and off this behavior.

timer on

timer off

switches the timer on or off. If the timer is switched on every command will be followed with the time it takes toe execute that command. Special named timers can be defined and used.

timer start mytimer

timer stop mytimer

timer print mytimer

Intuitive start, stop, and print options can be used. A timer will be reset with

timer reset mytimer

The manual page of the timer command can be found at: register

History

Warning

This command has not yet been implemented and should not be used

The manual page of the history command can be found at: register

The history command allows the execution of previously run commands. You can view them with

history

Commands in history are proceeded by a number. A past command can be reissued by appending the number to the history. Thus the command:

history 3

would execute the 3rd command in the command history. Instead of using the command history, you can also use the abbreviation h.