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From the Ruby CLI

Note

Applies to CLI v2 v2.0.13+.

General

The BOSH CLI v2 differs from v1 in two main ways: it is stateless, and it hyphenates single commands.

Statelessness

The BOSH CLI v2 does not store values for a current environment or configuration. In v1, you set the environment by passing a Director endpoint to bosh target and set the deployment by passing a manifest file to bosh deployment. Then you could run bosh deploy with no arguments.

In contrast, the BOSH CLI v2 is stateless. To specify a Director instance and deployment manifest to run a command over, you do one of the following:

• Pass the BOSH environment in with the -e flag and the deployment in with the -d flag, or
• Set the command shell environment variable BOSH_ENVIRONMENT to your Director endpoint or alias and set BOSH_DEPLOYMENT to your deployment name. You can also use bosh alias-env to create an alias for your BOSH environment configuration, to avoid having to reference the Director endpoint and credential information for every command.

Hyphenation

The BOSH v2 CLI also hyphenates single commands that v1 represented as space-separated word pairs. For example, bosh delete deployment in v1 corresponds to bosh delete-deployment in v2.

Before	After
bosh-init deploy	bosh create-env
bosh-init delete	bosh delete-env
bosh target	bosh alias-env my-env -e
bosh status	bosh env
bosh -t my-env ...	bosh -e my-env ...
bosh -d manifest-path ...	bosh -d deployment-name ... [3]
bosh deployment	n/a
bosh deploy	bosh deploy
bosh delete deployment	bosh delete-deployment
bosh tasks --no-filter	bosh tasks
bosh tasks recent 1000	bosh tasks -r=1000
bosh download manifest dep	bosh manifest
bosh vms my-dep	bosh instances
bosh vms my-dep	bosh -d my-dep vms

• Most commands require (--environment) -e and --deployment (-d) flags
• --deployment (-d) flag accepts a deployment name instead of a manifest
• bosh-init CLI is now absorbed by the bosh CLI. One binary!
• Variety of commands (create-env/delete-env/etc.) accept simple interpolation flags (-v/-l)
• All commands support friendlier non-TTY output, forceful TTY output and --json formatting
• All command names now use dashes instead of spaces
• All commands expect 'piece1/piece2' formatting for instances, releases, and stemcells
• ^+C doesnt ask for task cancellation and just exits CLI command (task continue to run)
• Sorts all tables in a more consistent manner
• Stores configuration file in ~/.bosh/config instead of ~/.bosh_config
• Most of the output formatting have changed

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Notable differences per command

• bosh alias-env and all commands

  • only allows connections to Director configured with verifiable certificates
  • no longer asks to interactively log in

• bosh log-in

  • no longer accepts username or password arguments

• bosh task

  • removed --no-track flag without replacement

• bosh tasks

  • improves argument syntax (-r for recent and -a for all)

• bosh deploy

  • no longer checks or requires director_uuid in the deployment manifest
    • to achieve similar safety make sure to give unique deployment names across environments

• bosh instances

  • no longer accepts deployment name argument in favor of using global --deployment (-d) flag

• bosh vms

  • no longer accepts deployment name argument in favor of using global --deployment (-d) flag

• bosh logs

  • adds -f flag similar to tail -f (uses bosh ssh command internally)

• bosh ssh

  • improves argument syntax, use ssh --help for more info
  • support for running commands against multiple machines
  • adds --opts flag to pass through options to ssh command for port forwarding etc.
  • adds -r flag to collate results from multiple machines

• bosh scp

  • improves argument syntax
  • support for running command against multiple machines

• bosh delete-deployment

  • removes explicit argument for specifying deployment in favor of global --deployment (-d) flag

• bosh add-blob

  • requires a path to its release destination
  • no longer uses symlinks to manage blobs but rather places file directly into blobs/