Installation

Regardless of where you place the box binary, the first time you execute it, a .CommandBox folder will be created in your user's home directory and CommandBox will be extracted into that location. If you delete this directory, it will be replaced the next time the CommandBox executable is run.

You can specify a different install location by adding -commandbox_home=E:\CommandBox when you run the box binary.

To avoid specifying the commandbox_home variable every time you can create a file called commandbox.properties (case sensitive) in the same directory as the binary, and fill it with this line:

commandbox_home=E:\\CommandBox

The CommandBox home can also be a path relative to the location of the commandbox.properties file.

commandbox_home=../boxHome

Windows

Extract the executable box.exe from the downloaded zip file, placing it anywhere you prefer where you can then execute it when needed, such as from the Windows command line/terminal. You can also run it directly Windows File Explorer, where you would just double click on the exe,which will open the CommandBox shell in a new terminal window.

Warning On Windows 10 and above, the first time you try to run via Windows File Explorer an exe that you've downloaded, Windows Defender Smartscreen will popup with a warning that "Windows protected your PC". You will need to choose the offered "More info" link and then the offered "Run anyway" button, to proceed.

Hint When running from the Windows command line/terminal, you can make it so that you can run box.exe while you are in any folder (not just the one where you placed it), by simply adding the exe's location to the Windows PATH system environment variable. See http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm

When you are finished running commands in the CommandBox shell, type exit. Or if you ran the box.exe from within Windows File Explorer, you can just close the terminal window which that opened.

Mac/ *Unix

Homebrew (Mac)

Homebrew is a great Mac package manager, it can easily install and keep your CommandBox installation up to date (even binary releases), just run the following for stable releases:

brew install commandbox

To stay with current bleeding edge releases use the following:

brew tap ortus-solutions/homebrew-boxtap
brew install --head ortus-solutions/homebrew-boxtap/commandbox

Then run the box binary to begin the one-time unpacking process.

Versions will be installed in /opt/homebrew/Cellar/commandbox. To switch between versions, you will need to install the new version - either using the bleeding edge tap or the main repo. For example to switch to a (very) old version:

brew install [email protected]
brew unlink commandbox
brew link [email protected]

If you are using a tap, and want to revert back to the current stable version

brew uninstall ortus-solutions/homebrew-boxtap/commandbox
brew install commandbox

If you want to use a commandbox.properties file as mentioned above, even though the symlink is added in /usr/local/bin, your box binary file will be in the /opt/homebrew/Cellar/commandbox/<version>/libexec/bin/ directory where you should place your commandbox.properties file. There will also be a box binary in the /opt/homebrew/Cellar/commandbox/<version>/bin/ directory where you should place the jre if you want CommandBox to use a version of Java that is different from your default version reported by java -version.

When using Homebrew to install CommandBox you must use Homebrew for any upgrade, minor or major. To upgrade CommandBox with Homebrew:

brew upgrade commandbox

NOTE: If you use Homebrew to upgrade your version of CommandBox it will erase your /opt/homebrew/Cellar/commandbox/<current_version>/ folder. So before upgrading, take a copy of your /opt/homebrew/Cellar/commandbox/<current_version>/libexec/bin/commandbox.properties file to drop back into /opt/homebrew/Cellar/commandbox/<new_version>/libexec/bin/ before running box for the first time after upgrading.

Manual Installation

Unzip the binary box and just double click on it to open the shell terminal. When you are finished running commands, you can just close the window, or type exit.

Hint You can place the binary in your /usr/local/bin directory so it can be available system-wide via the box command in any terminal window.

Linux apt-get

Please note that if you are running Ubuntu 18.04 or greater, or Debian 8 (Jessie) or greater, it's necessary to have the libappindicator-dev package in order to have the tray icon working correctly.

sudo apt install libappindicator-dev

Run the following series of commands to add the Ortus signing key, register our Debian repo, and install CommandBox.

Stable

( This first install routine also works for the Raspberry Pi. )

curl -fsSl https://downloads.ortussolutions.com/debs/gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/ortussolutions.gpg > /dev/null

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/ortussolutions.gpg] https://downloads.ortussolutions.com/debs/noarch /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/commandbox.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https commandbox

If you do not have Java installed you can install it with the following command.

sudo apt install openjdk-11-jdk

Then run the box binary to begin the one-time unpacking process.

Linux yum

Stable

Add the following to: /etc/yum.repos.d/commandbox.repo

[CommandBox]
name=CommandBox $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=https://downloads.ortussolutions.com/RPMS/noarch
enabled=1
metadata_expire=7d
gpgcheck=0

Then run:

sudo yum update
sudo yum install commandbox

Debian Linux manual install

After you have downloaded the commandbox.deb file, install it using the dpkg command.

sudo dpkg -i commandbox-debian-1.2.3.deb

Run the box binary to begin the one-time unpacking process.

Redhat Linux manual install

After you have downloaded the commandbox.rpm file, install it using the rpm command.

rpm -ivh commandbox-rpm-1.2.3.rpm