• There is a fix for a regression introduced in 5.4.0 where updating the version of a CF engine doesn't work without forgetting the server first.

• There is also an important security improvement to CommandBox servers. Thanks to Abram Adams for reporting this to Ortus so we could address it.

Release notes

Note, the details of the security improvement have been tracked privately.

Bug

COMMANDBOX-1382 Java path shows up twice in "server info --verbose"

COMMANDBOX-1381 Updating server in-place keeps old web.xml path

COMMANDBOX-1375 recipe with multiple "install" instructions fails

Improvement

COMMANDBOX-1380 Add additional interceptData to server interceptors

COMMANDBOX-1379 Update to WireBox 6.5.2

COMMANDBOX-1376 Immediately activate modules after installation

COMMANDBOX-1349 Improve multiselect DSL

Story

COMMANDBOX-1120 Add JSON and Properties output for info command

In this section you will find the release notes for the 5.x version of CommandBox.

• Version 5.4.2 - October 2021

• Version 5.4.1 - September 2021

• Version 5.4.0 - August 2021

• Version 5.3.0 - May 2021

• Version 5.2.1 - Dec 2020

• Version 5.2.0 - Nov 2020

• Version 5.1.1 - June 2020

• Version 5.1.0 - May 2020

• Version 5.0.0 - Mar 2020

Luis Fernando Majano Lainez

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer with over 15 years of software development and systems architecture experience. He was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in the late 70’s, during a period of economic instability and civil war. He lived in El Salvador until 1995 and then moved to Miami, Florida where he completed his Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering at Florida International University. Luis resides in Houston, Texas with his beautiful wife Veronica, baby girl Alexia and baby boy Lucas!

He is the CEO of Ortus Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in web development, ColdFusion (CFML), Java development and all open source professional services under the ColdBox and ContentBox stack. He is the creator of ColdBox, ContentBox, WireBox, MockBox, LogBox and anything “BOX”, and contributes to many open source ColdFusion projects. He is also the Adobe ColdFusion user group manager for the Inland Empire. You can read his blog at www.luismajano.com

Luis has a passion for Jesus, tennis, golf, volleyball and anything electronic. Random Author Facts:

• He played volleyball in the Salvadorean National Team at the tender age of 17

• The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit is something he reads every 5 years. (Geek!)

• His first ever computer was a Texas Instrument TI-86 that his parents gave him in 1986. After some time digesting his very first BASIC book, he had written his own tic-tac-toe game at the age of 9. (Extra geek!)

• He has a geek love for circuits, microcontrollers and overall embedded systems.

• He has of late (during old age) become a fan of running and bike riding with his family.

Keep Jesus number one in your life and in your heart. I did and it changed my life from desolation, defeat and failure to an abundant life full of love, thankfulness, joy and overwhelming peace. As this world breathes failure and fear upon any life, Jesus brings power, love and a sound mind to everybody!

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” – Proverbs 3:5

Brad Wood

Brad grew up in southern Missouri where he systematically disassembled every toy he ever owned which occasionally led to unintentional shock therapy (TVs hold charge long after they've been unplugged, you know). After high school he majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls where he still disassembles most of his belongings (including automobiles) just with a slightly higher success rate of putting them back together again.) Brad enjoys church, all sorts of international food, and the great outdoors.

Brad has been programming CFML since 2001 and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. Brad blogs at (http://www.codersrevolution.com) and likes to work on solder-at-home digital and analog circuits with his daughter as well as building projects with Arduino-based micro controllers.

Brad's CommandBox Snake high score is 141.

Contributors

• Jorge Reyes - ColdBox Aficionado

Release Notes

Bug

COMMANDBOX-1374 Some installs unnecessarily write to the box.json

COMMANDBOX-1370 ConfigService::settingExists() fails in race conditions due to non-varscoped variables in JSONService

Improvement

COMMANDBOX-1372 Support excludePaths in watcher DSL and watch command

COMMANDBOX-1369 Ensure Adobe wars have a seeds.properties file

COMMANDBOX-1368 Add tab complete for "env clear" command

COMMANDBOX-1367 Ignore empty startScript on server start

In this section you will find the release notes for the 4.x version of CommandBox.

• Version 4.8.0 - Sept 2019

• Version 4.7.0 - June 2019

• Version 4.6.0 - Mar 2019

• Version 4.5.0 - Dec 2018

• Version 4.4.0 - Nov 2018

• Version 4.3.0 - Oct 2018

• Version 4.2.0 - Aug 2018

• Version 4.1.0 - Jun 2018

• Version 4.0.0 - Jun 2018

web.xml Overrides

When you start an Adobe or Lucee CF Engine, the WAR CommandBox uses has a stock web.xml baked into it. Sometimes you may want to add custom servlets, servlet mappings, etc into your server. You can override the stock web.xml in part or in total with a file of your own which you specify in the server.json like so:

{
  "app" : {
    "webXMLOverride" : "path/to/web-override.xml"
  }
}

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/embedded-server/configuring-your-server/web.xml-overrides

Funky Parameters

In addition to quoting parameter values, parameter names can also be quoted. This is useful when setting keys into settings or JSON files that have spaces, hyphens or special characters. Each of these examples are now supported:

# quoted string
package set foo."bar.baz"=bum

# bracketed string
package set foo[bar.baz]=bum

# quoted, bracketed string
package set foo["bar.baz"]=bum

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/usage/parameters

Library updates

Lucee Server has been updated to 5.3.8.201 and JBoss Undertow has been updated to 2.2.10.Final. The Lucee update, as usual, applies to the CLI as well as the default server you get when you run server start.

Smarter Jar Endpoint

When you install a Jar via HTTP URL and the version number is baked into the URL, the jar endpoint now makes more assumptions about what the version of the package is that allows it to optimize the update checks and eliminate unnecessary downloads.

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/package-management/code-endpoints/jar-via-http#semantic-versioning

ask and confirm commands

Here are some fun commands for user interactivity in the shell. You can use these as part of a recipe or a nice "one-liner".

ask

The ask command is similar to the ask() method in Task Runners. It requires an interactive terminal and will ask the user a question and return their answer. It is meant to be changed with other commands.

set color=`ask "favorite Color? "`
echo "you said ${Setting: color not found}"

or with default values

ask question="Who is cool? " defaultResponse="Balbino!"

or with masked input

ask question="What is your password? " mask=*

Or fun stuff like this

ask "Secret phrase: " | assertEqual "mockingbird" || echo "access denied!" && exit 1

confirm

The confirm command will ask the user a yes/no question and return a passing or failing exit code from the command based on the answer.

confirm "do you want to update your packages? " && update

Remember the && operator will only execute the second command if the first command returns an exit code of 0.

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/helpful-commands/ask-and-confirm

server prune command

You can easily forget all servers which have not been started for a certain period of time with the server prune command. It accepts the number of days that need to have passed since a server was last started in order to prune it.

server prune days=30

# Skip the confirmation check
server prune --force

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/embedded-server/manage-servers#prune-old-servers

Release Notes

Here are the full release notes for CommandBox 5.4.0

Bug

COMMANDBOX-1364 Cancelling a prompt with active job doesn't clear job logs

COMMANDBOX-1361 Param tab completion is off-by-one when piping

COMMANDBOX-1360 Can't list files in directory with brackets ( [ or ] ) in the name

COMMANDBOX-1356 forgebox timeout is too small when publishing packages

COMMANDBOX-1354 dir command returns no results in drive root

COMMANDBOX-1353 Summary over 200 chars in box.json causes error when publishing

COMMANDBOX-1352 Addition of Apache logging classes breaks 3rd party libs using it

COMMANDBOX-1350 Installing a system module as one-off command doesn't clear wirebox metadata cache

COMMANDBOX-1348 Commenting server rules doesn't work correctly in text files

COMMANDBOX-1346 CommandDSL doesn't handle struct args

COMMANDBOX-1344 create a server prune command

COMMANDBOX-1339 Server start can hang when CF engine blows up

COMMANDBOX-1338 Tab complete doesn't work after a pipe

COMMANDBOX-1337 Working dir of server custom menu items doesn't default properly

COMMANDBOX-1336 Error when setting failing exist code in Task Runner

COMMANDBOX-1334 updating commandbox to 5.3.1 via Homebrew breaks with a java error

COMMANDBOX-1333 Rewrite rule with query string doubles up question mark

COMMANDBOX-1332 printTable column validation breaks with spaces in list

COMMANDBOX-1330 Directory listing not showing folders properly when names are numeric

COMMANDBOX-1230 Certain Java installs fail version check

Improvement

COMMANDBOX-1366 ask and confirm command to capture user input from shell

COMMANDBOX-1365 Improve version handling in JAR endpoint

COMMANDBOX-1351 Update to Lucee 5.3.8

COMMANDBOX-1347 Support dots in struct keys with set/show/clear commands

COMMANDBOX-1342 printTable custom header names for non-array input

COMMANDBOX-1331 Add printTable check for data with no columns

COMMANDBOX-1329 Sort column names in printTable --debug

New Feature

COMMANDBOX-1362 Set env vars directly in server.json for local one-off overrides

COMMANDBOX-1011 Support web.xml Overrides

Task

COMMANDBOX-1363 Update to Undertow 2.2.10.Final

CommandBox is a Java-based executable that will run on most recent desktop operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). Since it is a command line tool that uses a shell interface, it does not even require an operating system using a GUI. CommandBox can be used as a development aid and automation tool alongside your favorite CFML engine and IDE, but neither of those are requirements for installation of CommandBox.

Here are the requirements for installing and using CommandBox on your system. Notice some of these such as RAM and disk space depend on how many features you will plan on using. For instance, the shell only allocates about 256MB of RAM to run, but if you plan on starting embedded servers, that will spawn additional threads-- each of which will consume their own memory.

Operating System

• Windows XP+

• Mac OS

• Linux

Hardware

• 256MB+ RAM

• 250MB+ free hard drive space

• Multi-core CPU recommended

Software

A Java JRE is listed as a software requirement, but if you have a brand new PC with no JRE we have a download option that contains the Java Runtime bundled with it.

CLI Shell

We upgraded to a new version of the underlying library that handles the CLI interactions which brought a number of nice things.

• The cls command now clears background colors that used to be left on the screen

• Tab completion works better when two folders with different case were in the same directory

• When developing commands, default text can be placed in the buffer when asking the user for input.

• Fixed some instances where undesired spaces would get added when hitting tab completion

We also made the following improvements to the CLI shell environment

• You don't need to escape an equals sign that's part of a quoted parameter value

• Removed extra line break when piping the output of the "run" command

• Fixed some regressions when piping text to the box binary

• Added better BOM detection when tailing files

• cp command will create destination directories

• Windows paths that start with \ or / will be treated as absolute (like DOS works)

• All OS's will expand ~ to the current user's home directory

Tail Command

The tail command used to only take a file as input, but now you can pipe raw text in as well.

When tailing a file, you can specify the --follow flag and any new text added to the file will live stream to your console until you press Ctrl-C to stop. This is perfect for tailing application logs while your code is running to see new entries.

The server log command also has a new --follow flag added to it which will live stream a running server's console log to the shell until you press Ctrl-C to stop it.

Package Management

The artifact storage location is now customizable thanks to Chris Schmitz, allowing you to store your artifacts on another drive, or even a network share so your coworkers can all use the same "local" copies.

CommandBox will always re-download snapshot versions of packages to make sure you get a fresh version.

When you try to install a package and CommandBox is offline, instead of giving up, we'll now look in your local artifacts cache for a satisfying version. If we find a package that works in your artifacts, we'll install it instead.

Server Starting

We added a few new ways to start up a server. You can use the --debug flag when starting a server to see additional information and the foreground process also waits for the server to start before finishing. Now when starting in debug mode this output will stream to the console as it becomes available instead of showing up all at the end. This is great to troubleshoot errors that are happening on server start as well as finding the slow parts of the startup sequence.

By default, your servers fire up in a new process that runs independently from the CLI. There is now a new flag called --console that will start the server up in the foreground and stream the console output to the CLI for you to watch. The start command will not end and will keep streaming the console output until you press Ctrl-C to stop it. You can also use --debug alongside the console flag for even more information.

Server Welcome Files

If you have an app that uses a default welcome file other than index.cfm, you can control that now.

Better SES URLs

This is one that you take for granted if you've always used Adobe ColdFusion, but for any CF server not running on Adobe's custom version of Tomcat, you can't use SES URLs in a subfolder like this without adding custom mappings to your web.xml:

Server Configuration

All server engines and versions have been standardized to install into the same reliable directory structure to make it easier for you to script config file replacements.

• For Adobe CF WARs, the xml config files are located in the WAR here: /WEB-INF/cfusion/lib/neo.*.xml

• For the Lucee server context, the xml config file is located in the WAR here: /WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/lucee-server.xml

• For the Lucee web context, the xml config file is located in the WAR here: /WEB-INF/lucee-web/lucee-web.xml.cfm

To find the folder where your WEB-INF lives (as well as lots of other information about your server) you can use the server info command to get useful properties about a starting or started server.

Read more about this here:

Custom Server Home

• Customize Lucee's server context folder with the serverConfigDir setting

• Customize Lucee's web context folder with the webConfigDir setting

• Customize where the entire WAR explodes to for any server with the serverHomeDirectory setting

This is very powerful since it gives you full control over the server deployment. Server installs have also been changed to NOT overwrite existing files when they unzip, so any config files you place in the server home prior to starting the server will be left in place and used by the server when it starts up. This means you can have datasources, mappings, and more start out-of-the-box for your site on a fresh install.

Read more about this here.

A Few Changes

There were a few small changes in the "undocumented" core of CommandBox that got rearranged to make more sense. There's a small chance you may have been relying on one of them, so take note:

• The serverHome property that comes back from server info has been renamed to serverHomeDirectory.

• The webConfigDir property used to point to the server home, but this was incorrect. The property will now be blank unless specified. Use serverHomeDirectory instead.

• The default Lucee server used to have a non-standard folder structure, but now matches the WAR folders of all other servers

• The web context in Lucee servers used to be in a folder named after a random hash which was kind of silly (and impossible to find). It's now always under /WEB-INF/lucee-web

• All "internal" Lucee servers used to share a single server context (and settings). All servers are now separate. Use the serverConfigDir setting to point more than one server at a single server context or use one of the new options for copying configs.

• The core CLI server context now has a default password of "commandbox" set. This would apply if you wanted to use the tag from .cfm files executed via the shell or a custom command.

• Several new properties were added to the server info data for your convenience. Check them out by starting a server and running server info --JSON.

Release Notes

Bug

New Feature

Improvement

Major Areas of Development

• Major rewrite of CLI engine loader

  • Lucee 5 now powers the CLI

  • Using JSR-223 to dynamically load Lucee 5

• All 3rd Party libs updated

  • JGit

  • Launch4J

  • Runwar

  • JLine3

• Improved Task Runner support

  • Task scaffolding with “task create”

  • Task DSL to call other tasks

  • Ortus Builds are now being converted to Task Runners. No Ant! No XML!

• Support for Private package

• Revamped Server Logs (access, rewrite, console)

• ColdBox 5 updates

• Tons of bug fixes and improvements

Featured Enhancements

256 Color support

CLI Improvements

Along with the newest version of JLine, there's a ton of nice little things now available in CommandBox 4. The first is a totally revamped tab completion interface. Pressing Tab is now prettier, colored, and more organized. Help is integrated right into the interface, and pressing tab repeatedly will cycle through the available options instead of redrawing the screen over and over.

Next is color coding when you type commands in the shell. This make it much easier to tell when you've typed the name of a command correct and makes the difference between the command and parameters easier on your eyes.

Finally is tab complete and syntax highlighting in the REPL. You can tab complete any CFML function as well as previous variable names you've typed. Common CFML keywords are highlighted, as well as CFML functions and there's even color coded matching of braces, parens, and quotes as you type.

Shell History

There are two new features in the shell's history. Pressing "up" will still show the previous items in your history. But typing a partial command like "cd" and THEN hitting up will jump to the most recent histories that start with that word. Very handy to find that one "coldbox create..." command you ran two days ago.

The second new history feature is known in the bash world as i-search. Press Ctrl-Shift-R to open a search from the console where you can search your entire command history by keyword. Keep pressing Ctrl-Shift-R to cycle backwards through the results. Press Ctrl-Shift-S to cycle forwards through the results. Press enter to run the matched search select, or edit it inline before running it.

CommandBox Bullet Train

There's a new CommandBox module available called "commandbox-bullet-train" which makes the CLI look super sleek and sexy. You can add it very easily with:

You'll want to install a powerline-patched font as well. Check out the instructions under the "Fonts" section in the readme.

And is that some sweet new ASCII art taking advantage of 256 colors as well as a randomized quote/tip on every shell start? Why yes, yes it is!

Interactive Inputs

Interactive Jobs

Some of the more wordy tasks you perform like installing packages and starting servers have gotten a big makeover in how they reveal their output to you. If an installation fails, you want to know about it, but so long as everything worked, you usually don't care. These actions will now scroll the last few active log entries past in a controlled format, but hide them at the end so the shell stays much cleaner, even when installing dozens of packages at once.

As an example, installing CFConfig actually installs 9 separate packages. This used to output around 100 lines of console logging which no one in their right mind ever read. All the same logging is still there, but now by the time it's done, this is all you see:

If you want to troubleshoot, or you are running this install as part of a build and you want to see all this output later, just use the --verbose flag. For server starts, using the --debug flag will preserve all your precious log output on the screen after the server starts.

Even cooler, the Interactive Job interface is fully documented and available for you to use in your Task Runners or Custom Commands.

Docs:

Example:

Which looks like this when it's done:

Server Logs

We did a lot of work to make dealing with servers easier-- especially when it comes to your log files. Console starts and tailing server logs are now color coded so it's easier to find errors and warnings.

We've also fine tuned what information shows up when you do --console starts as well as --debug starts to reduce the noise and enhance the useful information. For instance, when you do:

You'll see a line of debug logging that shows if the URL rewrites kicked in and what the URL was rewritten to. How useful is that?!

Remember you can view and tail the server "out" logs like so:

Access Logs

The built in Undertow web server that CommandBox uses just got more powerful. You can turn on access logs that show you every incoming HTTP request in the same "common format" as Apache web server.

You can view and tail this log file like so:

URL Rewrite Logs

But wait, there's more logging goodness. Troubleshooting rewrite rules can be really tricky. That's why we broke out a new separate log file just for Tuckey Rewrites to dump into. You can dial in how much information you get with --debug and --trace server starts.

You can view and tail this log file like so:

Automatic Log Rotation

CommandBox web servers are truly ready for prime time. All the Undertow log files above automatically rotate which means you'll never fill up a hard drive on accident due to out of control log files.

Version Checks on Startup

Another optional module you can install is the CommandBox update check module. It will check every 24 hours (when starting the shell) and let you know if your CLI or any of your system modules are out of date.

Pipe output of native OS binaries

This used to work back in the day, but was a regression back when I added the ability to interact with native binaries. Now you have the best of both worlds.

Task DSL

Running other tasks from inside of Task Runners is now easier. Docs:

Example:

(Same as running "task run build" from the CLI)

Actual Proper Non-Sucking Ctrl-C and Ctrl-D support

You can now cancel long running commands, tasks, and even HTTP downloads by pressing Ctrl-C. Yay! Pressing Ctrl-C from the prompt does nothing, which is consistent with other shells. Pressing Ctrl-D from the shell will now exit CommandBox entirely which is also consistent with other shells. In case you're wondering, Ctrl-C fires the interrupt terminal signal, and Ctrl-D sends the EOF (end of file) signal.

Docs:

Load ad-hoc jars for Task Runners

You can now load ad-hoc jars right from Task Runners which is sometimes necessary for working with Java libs. Docs:

Examples:

Task Scaffolding

Wanted to play with Task Runners but not sure where you start? Drop everything, grab the closest CommandBox 4 CLI, and run these two commands:

You just created a new task and ran it. Go on, look around!

Updated Directory Listing

Directory listings have gotten a makeover. The columns actually align, the file sizes are human-readable, and the file types are color coded. Be careful, you might actually be able to find stuff now!

ASCII Art Stereograms

If you remember the "Magic Eye" books from your childhood, you'll be pleased to know CommandBox has an ASCII Art Stereogram for every day of the month. You'll find it hiding inside the info command. The "image" will change every day at midnight.

If you keep looking like that, your face will freeze that way!

Known Breaking Changes

We tried very hard to keep CommandBox 4 compatible but there are a few things that might surprise you.

• The REPL and Task Runners run against Lucee 5.2.7 instead of 4.5.5. That might affect valid CFML syntax as well as datasource definitions

• The default server you get when you type "server start" is also Lucee 5.2.7, not Luce 4.5.5.

• Java 7 support removed. This affects both the core CLI as well as any servers. For CF9 users, you can still run CF9 servers but you'll need to use an older version of Java 8 such as 1.8.0_92. (Note: Java 9 and 10 don't work yet!)

• Native CFML execution via box foo.cfm now routes through the "execute" command which means no Application.cfc will get run. You can refactor your cfm scripts or use the undocumented _internalRequest() function in Lucee 5.

• CommandBox 4 is prettier, more productive, and cooler than CommandBox 3. This may cause CLI envy with your Node coworkers. Don't worry, this is normal.

Bug

Story

New Feature

Improvement

The source code for this book is hosted in GitHub: https://github.com/ortus-solutions/commandbox-docs. You can freely contribute to it and submit pull requests. The contents of this book is copyright by Ortus Solutions, Corp and cannot be altered or reproduced without author's consent. All content is provided "As-Is" and can be freely distributed.

• The majority of code examples in this book are done in cfscript.

External Trademarks & Copyrights

Flash, Flex, ColdFusion, and Adobe are registered trademarks and copyrights of Adobe Systems, Inc. Railo is a trademark and copyright of Railo Technologies, GmbH. Lucee is a trademark and copyright of Lucee Association Switzerland.

Notice of Liability

The information in this book is distributed “as is”, without warranty. The author and Ortus Solutions, Corp shall not have any liability to any person or entity with respect to loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the content of this training book, software and resources described in it.

Contributing

We highly encourage contribution to this book and our open source software. The source code for this book can be found in our GitHub repository where you can submit pull requests.

Charitable Proceeds

15% of the proceeds of this book will go to charity to support orphaned kids in El Salvador - http://www.harvesting.org/. Please donate and purchase the printed version of this book as every book sold can help a child for almost 2 months.

Shalom Children's Home

Shalom Children’s Home (http://www.harvesting.org/) is one of the ministries that is dear to our hearts located in El Salvador. During the 12 year civil war that ended in 1990, many children were left orphaned or abandoned by parents who fled El Salvador. The Benners saw the need to help these children and received 13 children in 1982. Little by little, more children came on their own, churches and the government brought children to them for care, and the Shalom Children’s Home was founded.

Shalom now cares for over 80 children in El Salvador, from newborns to 18 years old. They receive shelter, clothing, food, medical care, education and life skills training in a Christian environment. The home is supported by a child sponsorship program.

We have personally supported Shalom since 2006; it is a place of blessing for many children in El Salvador that either have no families or have been abandoned. This is good earth to seed and plant.

CommandBox Manual - Version 5.4.2

Welcome to the CommandBox Manual. CommandBox is a standalone, native tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux that will provide you with a Command Line Interface (CLI) for developer productivity, tool interaction, package management, embedded CFML server, application scaffolding, and sweet ASCII art. It seamlessly integrates to work with any of Ortus Solutions *Box products, but it is also open for extensibility for any ColdFusion (CFML) project as it is written in ColdFusion (CFML) using our concepts of CommandBox Commands.

Versioning

CommandBox is maintained under the Semantic Versioning guidelines as much as possible. Releases will be numbered with the following format:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>.<buildID>

And constructed with the following guidelines:

• Breaking backward compatibility bumps the major (and resets the minor and patch)

• New additions without breaking backward compatibility bumps the minor (and resets the patch)

• Bug fixes and misc changes bumps the patch

License

CommandBox is open source and bound to the LGPL v3 GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

• Copyright by Ortus Solutions, Corp

• CommandBox is a registered trademark by Ortus Solutions, Corp

Info The CommandBox Websites, Documentation, logo and content have a separate license and they are a separate entity.

Discussion & Help

The CommandBox help and discussion group can be found here: https://community.ortussolutions.com/c/communities/commandbox/

Reporting a Bug

We all make mistakes from time to time :) so why not let us know about it and help us out. We also love pull requests, so please star us and fork us: https://github.com/ortus-solutions/commandbox

• https://ortussolutions.atlassian.net/browse/COMMANDBOX

Professional Open Source

CommandBox is professional open source software backed by Ortus Solutions, Corp offering services like:

• Custom Development

• Professional Support & Mentoring

• Training

• Server Tuning

• Security Hardening

• Code Reviews

• Much More

Resources

• Official Site: http://www.ortussolutions.com/products/commandbox

• Source Code: https://github.com/ortus-solutions/commandbox

• Bug Tracker: https://ortussolutions.atlassian.net/browse/COMMANDBOX

• Twitter: @ortussolutions

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ortussolutions

• Google+: https://google.com/+OrtusSolutions

• Vimeo Channel: http://vimeo.com/channels/commandbox

HONOR GOES TO GOD ABOVE ALL

Because of His grace, this project exists. If you don't like this, then don't read it, it's not for you.

"Therefore being justified by **faith**, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by **faith** into this **grace** wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God." Romans 5:5

There is now a new "forgebox logout" command you can use for testing or just to remove your API token from the local CLI.

# Logout one user
forgebox logout username

# logout all users
forgebox logout

You can change CommandBox's default tab completion to be an inline list that follows your cursor. This setting requires you to close and re-open the shell to take affect.

config set tabCompleteInline=true

Read more here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/config-settings/misc-settings#tabcompleteinline

We've added better debugging information for Server Profiles. If you add the --verbose flag to your server start, you'll be able to see what profile was detected for your server, and what baked-in rules have been turned on as a result.

|------------------------------
   | √ | Setting Server Profile to [development]
   |   |------------------------------------------------------
   |   | Profile set from "environment" env var
   |   | Block CF Admin disabled
   |   | Block Sensitive Paths enabled
   |   | Block Flash Remoting enabled
   |   | Directory Browsing enabled
   |   |------------------------------------------------------

We've added a new Single Server Mode you can enable in the CLI to make using CommandBox in Docker images easier.

Read more here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/embedded-server/single-server-mode

Release Notes

Here are the release notes for the 5.2.1 release.

Bug

• [COMMANDBOX-1231] - Installing via lex endpoint uses incorrect file extension

• [COMMANDBOX-1232] - Location of predicate file is in a folder that the Docker finalization script deletes

• [COMMANDBOX-1238] - Command alas for run command doesn't expand properly

New Feature

• [COMMANDBOX-1237] - Add config setting to activate JLine's AUTO_MENU_LIST

• [COMMANDBOX-1240] - forgebox logout command

Improvement

• [COMMANDBOX-1227] - verbose server start output for profile and security settings

• [COMMANDBOX-1228] - Extend ${} scopes to apply to any getSetting() call or "env show" command

• [COMMANDBOX-1229] - Modules aren't unloaded on reload or shutdown

• [COMMANDBOX-1233] - Add debug output that shows location of commandbox.properties file on start

• [COMMANDBOX-1234] - Add single server mode for CommandBox in a Docker container

• [COMMANDBOX-1236] - Add Testbox runner to sensitive paths in production profile

• [COMMANDBOX-1241] - Use UTF-8 when reading files with "cat" command

Override Config Settings via Env Vars

Every Config Setting can be overridden by convention by creating environment variables in the shell where you run box. This is ideal for CI builds where you want to easily set ForgeBox API keys, or tweak settings for your build.

More Info:

Override Server Settings via Env Vars

Every server setting can be overridden by convention by creating environment variables in the shell where you run box. This is ideal for CI builds where you want to easily set ports, or tweak settings for your build.

HTTP/2 Support

CommandBox now has out-of-the-box support for the HTTP/2 protocol. It is always enabled by default and browsers will use it when you're serving over HTTPS.

JMES JSON filtering / jq Command

We've added a new jq command which behaves roughly like the bash counterpart. You can pipe in JSON, or read the JSON from a file and apply a JSON query against it which can be used to filter, massage, rewrite, map, or filter the JSON into a new JSON object.

We've also added the ability to specify powerful jq filters to the "package show", "server show", and "config show" commands directly. Just prefix your filter with the text "jq:" like so:

AJP Secret Support

For this to work, you must also configure your AJP proxy in your web server to send the same secret!

AsyncManager Available to Task Runners and Commands

We've updated the version of WireBox inside the CLI and now have access to the AsyncManager for sweet threading and scheduled task support.

CommandBox is using an AsyncManager scheduled task thread now to redraw interactive jobs and progress bars. Look out for some new eye candy hiding in your server starts and package installs!

New Table Printer

The print helper in commands and Task Runners has a new toy that will print ASCII representations of tabular data thanks to a pull request from Eric Peterson. You can see it in the output of the outdated command.

And you can use it in your Task Runners like so:

ColdBox Scaffolding for REST Handlers

When scaffolding ColdBox handlers, we have support for ColdBox 6.x REST Handlers now.

Experimental Server Features

You can enable extra Resource Manager Logging when troubleshooting file system issues:

You can force case sensitivity on a Windows server:

You can force case Insensitivity on a Linux server:

You can enable a cache of file system lookups of servlet paths. This is only for production and will eliminate repeated file system hits by your CF engine, such as checking for an Application.cfc file on every request, or testing where the servlet context root is. Standard Adobe ColdFusion installations have a similar cache of "real" paths from the servlet context that is tied to a setting in the administrator called "Cache Webserver paths" but that setting is not available and does not work on CommandBox servers for some reason. This setting would apply to any CF engine.

HTTPS Redirect/HSTS

When using a CommandBox web server in production, you may wish to force your users to visit your site over HTTPS for security (and for HTTP/2 to work). However, it is desirable to still have your web server listening on HTTP so a user just typing your address in his browser can still connect to HTTP and then redirect. CommandBox can be configured to redirect all HTTP traffic over to HTTPS with the following setting.

If you want to go one step further, you can add a Strict-Transport-Security header to your site. This instructs the browser to automatically use HTTPS every time the user visits your site again.

Force Colored Output in your Builds

CommandBox won't use ANSI color formatting when running inside of a non-interactive terminal. However, build servers such as Gitlab or Jenkins (via a plugin) support ANSI color sequences. You can force CommandBox to use colored text output with this new setting:

Loose Semantic Version Parsing

One of the common hangups for people dealing with Lucee Server and Adobe ColdFusion CF Engines versions, is that CommandBox follows the npm-flavor of the semantic version spec and expects

instead of

So we've loosened our sem ver library to treat the 4th number as a build ID if there is no plus sign in the version (instead of just discarding the 4th digit as the spec requires)

Support for "localhost subdomains"

Most modern browsers allow you to make up any subdomain you want before localhost such as mySite.localhost and will simply resolve them to localhost (127.0.0.1) even without a hosts file entry. CommandBox now supports using these domains and will bind your server's ports to localhost even without using the commandbox-hostupdater module.

Relative CommandBox home

You can customize where CommandBox lives by placing a commandbox.properties file next to the box binary. We have better support for relative paths now so you can have portable CommandBox installations such as a thumb drive.

Halt Server If Port In Use (Breaking Change)

The only known breaking change in this release is if you try to start two servers on the same HTTP port. Previously, CommandBox would just ignore the port on the second server and choose a random port. Due to the confusion that can cause, CommandBox will now throw an error. If you want to override an explicit port locally, set the port to an empty string or a 0 and CommandBox will choose a random port for you. For example, if you are using the commandbox-dotenv module, you can put this line in your project's .env file to override the port in your server.json

Relative Web Alias Behavior (regression)

If you have a server with the server.json outside of the web root and at least one relative web alias, the alias will not work on the first start of the server. The workaround is to change the web aliases to be relative to the folder that the server.json lives in.

Incompatibility with old DotEnv module

Some users receive the following error when starting CommandBox after updating:

If you see this, it means you have an older version of the commandbox-dotenv module installed that is not compatible with the new version of WireBox inside CommandBox. To fix, delete this folder out of your CommandBox home:

Now the CLI will start and you can install the latest version of dotenv.

Release notes

Here is the list of all tickets included in the 5.3.0 release.

Bug

Improvement

New Feature

Cached HTTP Downloads

You can now cache downloads using the HTTP(S) endpoints using the following syntaxes:

This will speed up builds.

Change to Previous Directory

Thanks to a pull request from John Berquist, we've borrowed a Bash and Powershell feature of being able to change back to your previous working directory by typing this:

Better Tab Completion

Thanks to more pull requests from John Berquist, you can use file and folder based tab completion when typing native binaries from CommandBox

And tab completion also works better now when typing a quoted string such as a file path that contains a space. This is a huge timesaver!

Access to Intercept data in package scripts

Package scripts that are fired from internal interception points, can access any intercept data via environment variables. This example writes a file into a server home directory when the server starts, using an environment variable to dynamically find the correct path.

Release Notes

Here are the full release notes for CommandBox 4.8.0:

Bug

New Feature

Improvement

CommandBox is a standalone, native Command Line Interface (CLI), Package Manager, Embedded CFML Server and Read Eval Print Loop (REPL) aimed to help ColdFusion (CFML) developers become more productive through automation, dependency management, command line-based tools, and ASCII snake games.

Features at a Glance

CommandBox is an amalgamation of many different tools and borrows concepts from NPM, Grunt/Gulp, Maven, Bower, and Node. Features include:

• Command Line for ColdFusion (CFML)

• Operating System integration for executing commands

• Ability to create and execute commands built using ColdFusion (CFML)

• ForgeBox integration for cloud package management and installations

• ColdBox Platform, TestBox, and ContentBox CMS Integrations

• Integrated servlet server with rewrite capabilities

• Ability to create command recipes and execution

• REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop) console for immediate ColdFusion

  (CFML) interaction

• Ability to interact with user via CLI and create workflows and

  installers

• Ability to execute workflows and tasks

• Built-in Help system

Updated bundled Java libraries

• JLine - 3.19.0

• jGit - 5.11.0.202103091610-r

• Launch4j - 3.14

• JANSI - 2.3.2

Recursive jar scanning libDirs

When you configure libDirs for a server, CommandBox used to only load jar files found in the root. Now it will include sub directories which gives you more flexibility around how to install your jars.

New printTable Command

In the previous release, we introduced a new helper for printing ASCII Art tables in your custom commands and task runners. We've taken this a step further and wrapped the table printer utiilty in a new command so you can use it from the CLI directly. We've also expanded its functionality to accept ANY data in as JSON and it will marshall it into a query for you. This means it can be a query, an array of structs, an array or arrays, and more. You can now get quick and easy visualization of any data right from the CLI or in builds.

New sql command for on-the-fly manipulation of data

As if the previous command isn't cool enough, we've also added a new "sql" command which will also accept any sort of data as JSON, marshall it into a query object and allow you to alias, filter, order, and limit the rows on the fly using CFML's query of queries!

The sql command works very nicely with the new tablePrinter command, and truly makes JSON a first class citizen of the CommandBox CLI.

Small change to print.table() helper

We've made a small adjustment to the print.table() helper that was introduced in CommandBox 5.3.1 as follows. The old method signature is

And the new method signature is:

The parameters to the new printTable command matches the NEW method signature of the print.table() helper as well.

Format XML in REPL

When working with XML in the REPL, formatting is now applied when the XML is printed out to the console, making it easier to read (same as JSON)

Release Notes

Bug

Improvement

New Feature

In this section you will find the release notes for each version we release under this major version. If you are looking for the release notes of previous major versions use the version switcher at the top left of this documentation book. Here is a breakdown of our major version releases.

• - Mar 2020 - May 2021

• - Jun 2018 - Sept 2019

• - Feb 2016 - Nov 2017

• - June 2015 - Nov 2015

• - Feb 2015

Java 14 support

Java 14 is now supported in CommandBox 5.1.0. In order to support Java 14, we had to stop using Pack200 which means the binary sizes have grown a little. The good news is CommandBox will start up a little faster on its first run since there's less to unpack now.

Start pure HTML Server

You can start up a lightweight server that only serves static files now with CommandBox.

New CommandBox Light and CommandBox Thin Binaries

In pursuit of the smallest possible Docker images, we have CommandBox light which is built on Lucee Light. We also have a box "thin" binary you can swap out with the full self-extracting binary when using CommandBox in custom docker images. Check out Pete Freitag's to see both of these in use in a super tiny 78 Meg docker image. More docs here:

Force working directory when starting

If you're using box in an integration where you want it to start up in a specific working directory, there is a new bootstrap CLI arg for that.

Server tray menu item custom commands

You've always been able to specify custom menu items in your server.json or global config settings, but we've kicked it up a notch. Not only can you contribute to existing sub menus now, you can execute arbitrary native commands synchronously or async.

Release Notes

Here's the full list of tickets closed down in the 5.1.0 release.

Bug

New Feature

Task

Improvement

The main features of CommandBox 4.5.0 are:

• Ability to install OpenJDK automatically for your servers to use ()

• Environment Variables in the shell ()

• Support for Forgebox Enterprise (TBA soon)

• JRE Bundled CommandBox installs now use OpenJDK instead of Oracle JDK

• TestBox Code Coverage integration ()

I already wrote a fairly comprehensive overview of the new features and big fixes here. Go read it:

Note, there are two backwards incompatible changes. The first is we turned OFF directory browsing by default on servers. You can easily get the old behavior back with

The second is that unhandled errors in the shell no longer show the stack trace (you probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't tell you!) Get the old behavior back with:

Release Notes

Here's the full list of everything that went into this release.

Bug

• [] - editing in the shell prompt is buggy while using Gitbash in VSCode

• [] - Passing positional args to task errors with required param

• [] - Passing command string as single arg to box fails

• [] - Exitting recipe with exit code errors

• [] - external module mappings broken in CommandBox 4

• [] - Incorrect behavior when parsing unmatched quotes

• [] - Cruft left in temp folder

• [] - Silence annoying ESAPI warnings

• [] - Warnings on java 11 about illegal reflective access

New Feature

Improvement

Task Target Dependencies

For a task that has more than one target (method) you can specify dependencies that will run, in the order specified, prior to your final target. Specify task target dependencies as a comma-delimited list in a depends annotation on the target function itself. There is no limit to how many target dependencies you can have, nor how deep they can nest.

Given the above Task Runner, typing

would run the runMeFirst() and run() method in that order.

Docs:

GZip Compression

The web server in CommandBox is capable of enabling GZIp compression to reduce the size of HTTP responses. To enable GZip compress on your CommandBox server, add a web.gzipEnable setting in your server.json file.

Add --simple flag to ls/dir command

When you get a directory listing in CommandBox, you can add the --simple flag which will only output the file and folder name without any other information. This feature was added to compliment the feature below.

forEach Command

The foreach command will execute another command against every item in an incoming list. The list can be passed directly or piped into this command. The default delimiter is a new line so this works great piping the output of file listings directly in, which have a file name per line.

This example will find all JSON files in a directory and run the cat command against them.

Java 9/10/11 support

This is still a little experimental since it hasn't gone through full testing, but we upgraded to Lucee 5.2.9.31 in the core CLI which has support for the newer versions of Java. We've removed the checks that previously preventing CommandBox from even trying to run on versions of Java later than 8 and at first glance it seems to be working though there's been some flakiness on Java 11. Please help test these later Java versions and remember that if you spin up a server, you'll want to still dial in Java 8 for Adobe CF 2016 and prior and Lucee 5.2.8.50 and prior even if you have the CLI running on Java 9+.

Docs for setting custom Java version in your server:

Release notes

Here's the full release notes for CommandBox 4.3.0.

Bug

New Feature

Improvement

This release was primarily to address a regression in 5.1.0 affecting Mac OS users who tried to start Lucee servers. If you see an error similar to this on a Lucee server and you're running a Mac and CommandBox 5.1.0, then this release will fix it for you.

If you are upgrading from CommandBox 5.1.0, there are only a handful of tickets which are listed below. If you are updating from an earlier version of CommandBox, please check out our and release blogs.

Release notes

Bug

• [] - Overzealous gitignore matching of parent directories when zipping up for ForgeBox storage

• [] - Enabling SSL results in some CFHTTP requests to fail.

• [] - writedump failing in Lucee

• [] - File globbing matching partial file names

Improvement

• [] - Allow for verbose startup without debug logging of requests

Here's the full list of what we've packed into the 4.7.0 release. Click any ticket link for more details.

Bug

• [] - CommandBox not recognizing implicit folder endpoint

• [] - Update semver for fix in prerelease comparison

• [] - Tokenizer breaks "run" command with odd syntax

• [] - init-wizard command is incorrectly aliasing as init

• [] - File watcher that modifies the file system triggers the watcher again

• [] - bump command doesn't work on a submodule

• [] - Text on standard input causes banner and prompt to be blank

• [] - Inconsistent behavior of "run" command.

• [] - Tab completion incorrect for some partial command names

• [] - Interactive jobs are not thread safe

Improvement

• [] - Leading zeros in semver prevent them from being matched

• [] - Allow --verbose flag on uninstall command

• [] - Add --roundup flag to indents command

• [] - JSON Schema for box.json

• [] - Update JGit to 5.3.0.201903130848-r

• [] - Update Jline to 3.10.0

• [] - Remove Riaforge endpoint Rince riaforge is dead

• [] - Modify default box.json from "init" command

• [] - Add box: namespace for compat with Coldbox injection DSL

• [] - Improve debugging and error messages for custom ForgeBox endpoints

• [] - If the test runner produces a 500 exception during watcher no output is shown

• [] - support for Environment variables in "Key" names

• [] - Make env vars in CommandBox visible to native OS binaries

• [] - Launching VSCode from ConEMU screws up the integrated terminal

• [] - Keep relative installPaths in box.json

Release Notes

Bug

• [] - Server commands can have huge delay on Windows

• [] - List artifacts alphabetically.

• [] - /usr/bin/open on Linux

• [] - Errors in command CFCs can cause box to exit completely during tab complete

• [] - Running native binary that returns lots of text can perform poorly

• [] - Interceptor service blows up if you register a module with an interceptor not matching any current states

• [] - Allow modules to register an interceptor with no currently valid states

• [] - Catch errors from desktop.isDesktopSupported()

New Feature

• [] - Allow system setting (env var) expansions in REPL

• [] - Improve task DSL to allow access to exit code

• [] - Add config setting to debug raw native command being used in the "run" command

Improvement

Release Highlights

• Fixed the annoying "server spanner" error that *nix users saw when starting servers.

• Updated CLI engine (and default server) version to Lucee 5.2.7.63 which includes an important security fix.

• Added a new "noninteractive" setting to improve the output on build servers like Jenkins or Travis-CI

• Task runner metadata changes picked up without needing to reload the CLI

• Ability to load ad-hoc modules on the fly from Task Runners

Release Notes

Here's the full list of tickets we addressed in the 4.1.0 release. Thanks to those who send me pull requests for some of these fixes and features!

Bug

• [] - server start on linux: "/bin/bash not found" message displays

• [] - Improve port binding logic

• [] - Task component metadata is not refreshed before each run

• [] - Error when invalid UTF-8 characters are in servers.json

New Feature

Improvement

There are a number of pretty exciting new features and a pile of bug fixes. And as usual, input from the community via Pull Requests. Huge thanks to Pete Freitag, Kai Koenig, Matthew Clemente, Bobby Hartsfield, Scott Steinbeck, Daniel Mejia, and Miguel Mathus! Here's an overview of the new stuff in 5.2.0

Library Updates

We know library updates are boring, but they are important and we want you to know we take them seriously. Keeping up-to-date ensure you have the latest fixes and security updates from all the third-party libs we bundle in CommandBox.

Here's an overview of what we updated in CommandBox 5.2.0.

• Upgraded Runwar from 4.1.2 to 4.3.8

• Upgraded JBoss Undertow from 2.0.27.Final to 2.2.0

• Upgraded UrlRewritesFilter to Ortus fork 5.0.1 with custom fixes

• Upgraded jboss-logging from 3.2.1.Final to 3.4.1.Final

• Upgraded jboss-logging-annotations from 2.1.0 to 2.2.1.Final

• Upgraded JCabi Log from 0.18 to 0.18.1

• Upgraded Apache HttpClient from 4.2.6 to 4.5.12

• Upgraded Apache httpmime from 4.2.6 to 4.5.12

• Removed unused JOpt Simple 5.0-beta-1

• Removed unused Gson 1.2.3

The Undertow bump is a minor update, but a pretty big deal. Ortus sent three pull requests to the core Undertow project fixing bugs and adding predicate logging. All of our pulls were accepted and merged into the core Undertow project and released in the 2.2 release.

Read more about library updates here:

Server Security Profiles

This is a feature that we expect to grow in the future. We've started it out simple, yet powerful but left a lot of room to build on it. The two main goals here are

• Make CommandBox secure-by-default so a server shoved in production comes nice and locked down

• Makes it very easy for you to toggle off all the security stuff for development

CommandBox now has profiles you can assign to a server when you start it to configure the default settings. This is to provide easy secure-by-default setups for your production servers, and to make it easier to switch between a development mode and production mode.

There are 3 currently supported profiles. Custom profiles will be added as a future feature.

• Production - Locked down for production hosting

• Development - Lax security for local development

• None - For backwards compat and custom setups. Doesn't apply any web server rules

In production mode, CommandBox will block access to your CF admin to all external traffic, will block all common config files such as box.json or .env and will block, the "TRACK" and "TRACE" HTTP verbs

You can set the profile for your server in your server.json

Or you can specify it when starting the server like so:

If a profile is not set, CommandBox looks for an environment variable called "environment" or it checks to see if the site is bound on localhost to try and guess the correct profile for you.

We've also added some new flags in your server.json to fully customize how your profile behaves.

‌Read more about Server Profiles here:

Server Rules

This is huge-- probably the biggest chunk of work, and it's actually what makes the server profiles above even possible! It's always been possible to perform basic lock downs with a custom rewrite file, but we've exposed an amazing built-in functionality of Undertow called the Predicate language. It allows you to create ad-hoc rules that apply to your server to provide any of the following:

• Security - Block paths, IPs, or users

• URL rewrites - Rewrite incoming URLs to something different

• Modifying HTTP requests on the fly - Set headers, cookies, or response codes

An example of a server rule using Undertow's predicate language to block access to any box.json files looks like this:

One of the best things about these rules, is they don't have to be in a single monolithic XML file. Instead they can come from

• An array of ad-hoc definitions in your server.json file or config server defaults

• one or more external JSON or text file specified in your server.json or config server defaults

• Built in CommandBox server profiles (see above)

• Custom 3rd party CommandBox modules that contribute rules on-the-fly (time to get creative!)

Here's some examples of what can be in your server.json

CommandBox also registers some custom rules in Undertow you can use for your CF apps:

There are lots of new docs on this. Read more about Server Rules here:

Task Runner Lifecyle events

The more we use Task Runners for builds, scheduled tasks, and utilities, we've seen the need to have lifecyle events in the same manner as the preHandler and postHandler sort of stuff in ColdBox MVC. Now if a task runner has methods of this name, they will be executed automatically.

• preTask - Before any target in the task

• postTask - After any target in the task

• aroundTask - Wraps execution of any target in the task

• pre- Before a specific target

• post- After a specific target

• around - Wraps execution of a specific target

• onComplete - Fires regardless of exit status

• onSuccess - Fires when task runs without failing exit code or exception

• onFail - Fires if exit code is failing after the action is done (always fires along with onError, but does not receive an exception object). Use this to respond generally to failures of the job.

• onError - fires only if an unhandled exception is thrown and receives exception object. Use this to respond to errors in the task. Does not fire for interrupted exceptions

• onCancel - Fires when the task is interrupted with Ctrl-C

The lifecycle methods are very powerful and can be controlled via whitelist and blacklists to control what targets they execute for. "Around" events are very easy to use thanks to the use of closure. There's a lot more details in the docs.

Read more about Task Runner Lifecyle events here:

System Setting ${} Namespaces

The default namespace when using the $ {foo} system setting expansion syntax is box environment variable, Java system properties, and OS environment variables.

It is also possible to leverage built-in namespaces to allow expansions that reference:

• server.json properties

• box.json properties

• arbitrary JSON file properties

• Config settings (like the config show command)

• Server info properties (like the server info property=name command)

• Other properties in the same JSON file

This gives you a lot more power now to be able to create dynamic configuration in your JSON files and even from the command line. Here are some examples:

And one of the coolest things is this implementation is driven by a new onSystemSettingExpansion interception point and completely extendable! That means you can write a module that powers something hypothetical like this:

Read more about System Setting namespaces here:

GZip Compression Control

CommandBox has had the ability to enable/disable GZip compression in Undertow for a while. Now you can fully control when it activates based on the type or size of file, etc. This feature utilizes the same Undertow predicate language that we introduced above.

Read more about GZip Compression Control here:

Generic Watch Command

This is a fun one. There are some specific commands that make use of the Watcher library in CommandBox such as testbox watch and coldbox watch-reinit. However, there is also now a generic watch command that will run any arbitrary command of your choosing when a path matching your file globbing pattern is added/updated/deleted. Use this to build custom watchers on-the-fly without needing to touch any CFML code to write a Task Runner.

That command will echo out "config files updated!" every time a JSON file gets changed in the current directory. Here's a more complex one:

That one will list every new file that's added in this directory and all sub directories.

Read more about the generic watch command here:

Control Default Browser

There are a handful of features in CommandBox that will open URLs for you in your default browser. We've had requests to allow the browser in use to be customized, so we've reworked all of that logic, consolidating it in some places and now you can control what browser CommandBox uses. To change the default browser for all URL opening functions use this:

Supported browsers are:

• firefox

• chrome

• opera

• edge (Windows and Mac only)

• ie (Windows only)

• safari (Mac only)

• konqueror (Linux only)

• epiphany (Linux only)

And you can even dial in a browser on demand for the browse and server open commands.

Read more about setting the default browser here:

Miscellaneous

Here are some honorable mentions.

.htaccess rewrite flags

The CommandBox Tuckey rewrites allow an .htaccess file that uses the mod_rewrite style syntax of rewrites. Previously, use of flags such as these didn't work:L

Server restart from tray icon

We've added a "restart" option to the tray icon that does exactly what you think it does.

Trick for "cd"ing up directories

There's a new trick supported in CommandBox's shell that we've borrowed that allows you to change directories and go "up" more than one directory with less typing:

Pipe into standard input of native binaries

You can now pipe the output of a previous command in CommandBox directly to a native binary like so:

In this case, clip is a Windows binary that will read the standard input and place that text on the clipboard.

Breaking Changes

We work hard to make every CommandBox upgrade backwards compatible. There's a couple things that you may notice different in this release. They're both done to put security first and can be modified to get your original behavior back.

Since the CF Administrator is now blocked for traffic not coming from localhost when in production mode, you may need to explicitly open up the CF admin to make it accessible again if you needed it open to the public on a production server. Even with the profile set to production, you can activate just the CF admin like so:

The web server built into CommandBox will now only serve static files if their extension is found in a whitelist of acceptable files. This is to prevent prying eyes from hitting files they shouldn't be able to access on your server. The current list of valid extensions is:

If you have a common static file you need to serve, you can add your own custom extensions to the list like so:

And if you think we've missed an obvious one that deserves to be added to the default list, please let us know.

Release Notes

Here's the full list of tickets in the 5.2.0-RC.1 release.

Bug

New Feature

Task

Improvement

Sub-task

Upgrade Compatibility

Even though this is a new major version, it should be very backwards compatible. CommandBox proper has no known backwards compatibility issues we're aware of, but note we've bumped libraries like Lucee Server, Undertow, and Java support, so you may notice differences due to these 3rd party lib updates. For example, one in Lucee 5.3 (which now powers your default server) is how page output buffer is handled.

You should be able to simply replace your box.exe binary and run it to get the same in-place upgrade you're used to. If you run into issue, you can try removing the "engine" folder in your ~/.CommandBox folder and try again. If you need to downgrade for any reason, replace the box binary with the old version, remove the "engine", "cfml", and "lib" folders in your CommandBox home and they will get re-created on the next run.

You may also notice the box binary is larger now. From 44 Megs up to 77 Megs. This is a regrettable byproduct of us turning off the Pack200 process we used to run against the Lucee jar. Lucee seems to have some bugs that causes it to re-download a bunch of OSGI bundles when we compress them and we can't figure it out, or get support on the matter, so for now we're just not compressing as much stuff. This was a huge blocker for anyone needing to run CommandBox on a PC with no external internet access as Lucee provides no mechanism to turn off it's auto-download behavior.

And finally, if you have installed any custom OSGI bundles into your CLI, they will be wiped by the upgrade process now. We didn't want to have to to do this, but Lucee has bugs that cause errors when doing in-place upgrades with the old OSGI bundles left in place and we couldn't get it fixed, so this was the only way to ensure in-place upgrades would "just work" without errors. We are leaving the Lucee engine folder, so any settings you may have put into your CLI should remain in place.

What's New?

There's a lot of new stuff in CommandBox 5.0.0. Here's an overview. One of the biggest new "features" is you can finally use CommandBox on Java 11+. This was not possible in CommandBox 4.x due to the version of Lucee not fully supporting newer versions of Java. Now that Lucee has been bumped to 5.3 (see below) you are free to leave java 8 behind for the CLI. Note if you're using CommandBox to start up older versions of Adobe CF or Lucee/Railo, you may still need to use java 8 specifically for your servers.

New Libraries

Let's start with the library updates. For the most part, all the jars we bundle are a "black box" but in reality, every update is usually for new features, fixes, or security patches. Here's an overview of the new libs:

• WireBox 5.6.2

• JLine 3.13.0

• Runwar 4.0.3 (major bump from 3.x)

• JBoss Undertow 2.0.27.Final (major bump from 1.x)

• JGit 5.5.1.201910021850-r

• Lucee 5.3.4.77("major" bump from 5.2)

• AdoptOpenJDK jdk-11.0.6+10 (In the JRE-included download) (major bump from 8.x)

New Features/Enhancements

You can now use user/pass or personal access token authentication when cloning Git repos over HTTPS. This has been tested with Github and Gitlab and is an alternative to SSH keys. Please check the docs, as Github and Gitlab both expect slightly different inputs.

There is a new Lex installation endpoint to help you acquire Lucee Extensions your app needs via the "install" command or a dependency in your box.json file. If the current directory has a Lucee server in it, CommandBox will install the extension file directly into your server's "deploy" folder (server context)

The auto-install feature into your server will work on any Lex package, even one coming from ForgeBox:

Tuning your server is easier now. You can configure your Undertow worker-threads setting with first-class server.json property

Which gives you this in your server.json

We've also unlocked a method for you to set ANY valid Undertow option or XNIO option. So if Undertow supports it, you can configure it!

We've added a new experimental feature that lets you create a batch file, powershell script, or bash shell script that directly starts a server with the exact settings that you get from "server start". This is for you to create super-optimzed startups in Docker or Service that bypass the CLI steps and "lock in" the settings. No server.json or CFConfig, or dotenv code will be processed, but you will have a fast streamlined start that is the same every time. Couple this with our new "dryRun" flag on server start that will unpack the CF engine, but not actually start the server, and you can create your customs start script like so:

The Globber helper can now take more than one globbing pattern. This also means every built-in command in CommandBox that takes a globbing pattern, can now take a comma delimited list of patterns. We've also added an exclude list of globbing patterns to the dir command as well.

We've got a couple new handy commands to help you from the command line, "unique" (modeled after the Bash "uniq" command)

And "sort" (modeled after the Bash "sort" command)

The "grep" command has received a "count" parameter if you just want the count of lines that match the regex (or no regex will count all lines)

The tray icon for your servers now has a new option under the "Open" menu that will open up the file system folder where the server home lives. This is nice for finding your CF Engine's log files.

Release Notes

There are a lot of bug fixes and even more enhancements I didn't cover above. You can read the full release notes here:

Sub-task

Bug

New Feature

Task

Improvement

Bug

• [] - Relative SSL certFile or keyFile path in server.json isn't expanded

• [] - propertyfile set errors if file doesn't exist

New Feature

• [] - Allow relative property file paths in task runners

Improvement

• [] - Allow custom tray contributions to have relative image path

• [] - Improve coldbox create app --wizard

• [] - Always run onServerInstall

• [] - add getInstance() to base interceptor class

• [] - Improve handling of loading a bad modules

• [] - Command to normalize line endings for a batch of files

• [] - Improve package parsing regex for private packages

What's New

• Task Runners - Run ad-hoc builds from the CLI written in CFML

• Manage System Packages - update, list, and uninstall system modules

• File Globbing - Use place holders like **.cfc for file operations to affect more than one file at a time.

• Command Aliases - Alias your favorite commands for easy access in the future

• Global Command Parameter Defaults - Set common parameters to have a given value at a global level

• System Settings - Utilize environment variables to make your package and servers more dynamic

• Testbox Run - Improved, minimalist output to the "testbox run" command

• TestBox Watchers - Watch a directory for file changes and run your unit tests

• Customize REST Servlets - Customize or disable the REST servlet paths on Lucee and Adobe servers

• Custom Java Versions - Start your CF servers with any version of Java you want

• Property files - New commands and helper libs for dealing with property files

• Basic Authentication - Enable basic security on your servers with unlimited users

• Custom URL to Open - Customize the browser URL that opens when you start a server

• Disable Tray Icon - Turn off the system tray icon for your servers entirely

• Show Proxy IP - Servers pass through the original user IP through proxies

• Jar Endpoint - Install 3rd party jars into your projects

Release Notes

Bug

New Feature

Task

Improvement

In this section you will find the release notes for the 3.x version of CommandBox.

• - Nov 2017

• - Aug 2017

• - Jul 2017

• - Mar 2017

• - Jan 2017

• - Nov 2016

• - Oct 2016

• - Jul 2016

• - Jul 2016

• - Feb 2016

• - Feb 2016

Bug Fixes

This release fixes an issue where Adobe CF servers will not start if you're machine is offline and also fixes a bug where the previous version of CommandBox didn't correctly remove old versions of jar files on upgrade.

Enhancements

Git tags when bumping a package command can have a custom prefix now. Tab completion options are also alphabetized. Ctrl-C is also handled better on Unix and actually works in Windows! Also, the timestamp on your sever.json file won't be updated unless the contents of the file actually changed.

Release Notes

Here is the full list of everything that changed in the CommandBox 3.4.0 release.

Bug

• [] - Adobe Servers won't start offline

• [] - start serverConfigFile=myServer.json doesn't load json settings

• [] - Adobe web.xml Flex config path is wrong after first engine start

• [] - Error checking whether server is running

• [] - cflib-coldbox endpoint creates invalid CFML for Adobe

• [] - write history before command finishes

• [] - Coldbox create interceptor doesn't create test with proper CFC mapping

• [] - war path not stored in server.json as relative path

• [] - CFML upgrades don't delete removed files

• [] - Forgetting a named server deletes the 'default' server.json too

New Feature