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 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 - . 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 () 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.

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.

• Versions 6.x - Feb 2024 -

• Versions 5.x - Mar 2020 - August 2023

• - Jun 2018 - Sept 2019

• - Feb 2016 - Nov 2017

• - June 2015 - Nov 2015

• - Feb 2015

In this section you will find the release notes for the 6.x version of CommandBox.

• - February 2024

• - November 2024

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:

CommandBox Manual - Version 6.3.2

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 guidelines as much as possible. Releases will be numbered with the following format:

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

• 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:

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:

Professional Open Source

CommandBox is professional open source software backed by offering services like:

• Custom Development

• Professional Support & Mentoring

• Training

Resources

• Official Site:

• Source Code:

• Ortus Community Forum:

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

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 . You can read his blog at

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!)

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 (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 () 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

In this section you will find the release notes for the 2.x version of CommandBox.

• - Nov 2015

• - Aug 2015

In this section you will find the release notes for the 1.x version of CommandBox.

• Version 1.0.0 - Feb 2015

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.

Even though you can run CommandBox from your favorite terminal window, there are a number of nice IDE integrations out there that are designed to allow you to run command line utilities from inside your favorite editor. Here's a few that we're aware of and how to use them. If you have more, please let us know!

This release contains 9 tickets-- several bug fixes and a couple nice new features.

Jakarta Servlet support

Adobe CF 2025, Lucee 7, and BoxLang 1.0 are all using the Jakarta servlet spec now. CommandBox will now detect that and automatically download a Jakarta version of Runwar to start the server on first start.

Server Warmup URLs

CommandBox servers now support one or more warmup URLs which will be automatically fired after the server comes online to ensure it's warmed up, even if there is no external traffic. You can choose what happens to incoming requests prior to the completion of the warmup (queue, block, or allow) as well as whether the warmup URLs are fired sync or async. The warmup URL can also hit any endpoint, acting as a simple webhook to notify that the server has come online if you want.

Read more:

Release Notes

Here are all the tickets closed in the 6.2.0 release.

Improvement

Capture partial task output in exception extended info

Improve 32 bit detection in java endpoint

whitelist /.well-known/ in extension whitelist

Support Jakarta EE

Bug

Coldbox Create Resource - 'open' variable doesn't Exists

SSL redirect not working with binding syntax

x86 being detected as 32 bit, but it can be 64 bit in java service

websockets hitting wrong site in multisite on Adobe

New Feature

Add on server start URL to warm up the server

This is a very small release with two changes.

• Update to Lucee 5.4.3.2

• Update bundled JRE to 11.0.20+8

Note Lucee 5.4.3.2 contains critical security patches which are outlined here:

The new Lucee version affects the core CLI runtime as well as the default server you get when running "server start" with no cfengine specified. Possible compatibility issues related to the major bump in Lucee version:

• This Lucee version does not include Hibernate, so the Ortus Hibernate extension is installed. We will stop doing this in 6.0

• This Lucee version has strict XML parsing settings on by default which may affect any servers you start which parse XML containing DTDs.

If you do run into XML errors, this code may help you in your Application.cfc, which allows DTDs, but still disallows XML external entities (XEE).

Release notes

Task

• Update bundled JRE to 11.0.20+8

• Update to Lucee 5.4.3.2

Release notes

Bug

COMMANDBOX-1475 Server shutdowns aren't always done cleanly

Don't prompt on already-running server when terminal isn't interactive

Globber copyTo() command mishandles *nix leading slash

preServerStart can no longer affect server.json env var replacements

Servers can no longer override rest mappings

Corruption in interactive job output

Can't set XNIO socket settings or Sequence types

Command chaining has a code path where "job" variable is not defined

cfpm breaks in single server mode

Improvement

Allow Undertow's resource manager file system watcher to be disabled

Customize Undertow's enabled SSL protocols

Task

Update to Lucee 5.3.9.141 stable

Properties weren't being read correctly from the server.json file. If you have been using server.json, please double check the format of the file here in our docs:

http://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/content/embedded_server/serverjson.html

This fix will make this functionality work as expected:

server set web.http.port=8000
server start

Upgrading

If you already have 3.0.0 then this fix only affects the CFML bits and is very easy for you to install. Simply run this command:

If you're still on CommandBox 2.x, check out our to see the cool new stuff.

Here's an overview of the new goodies in this release.

box-lock.json Package Lock File

This release introduces lock file support for CommandBox package management, ensuring consistent dependency versions across installations. When you use the new --lock flag with the install command, CommandBox creates a box-lock.json file that pins exact versions of your dependencies. The system intelligently maintains these locked versions during install, uninstall, and update operations while respecting your semver ranges—automatically updating the lock file when your requested version falls outside the locked range or when using force installs. This feature works seamlessly alongside existing workflows and has no impact on projects that don't use lock files.

• 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

Bug

Some installs unnecessarily write to the box.json

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

Since CommandBox is a command line tool, it requires no GUI. If you are using an OS with a GUI (like Windows) and you run the box executable, the CommandBox interactive shell will open in a new window. CommandBox looks and behaves like a Bash or DOS window, but the command prompt is not your native OS-- it's CommandBox running INSIDE your native shell and interpreting what you type.

Interactive Shell

As such, operating system commands won't execute (unless we've implemented a similar one in CommandBox). However, we also have a command called

When you run box without any parameters, you get the CommandBox interactive shell. We use a library called JLine for this interaction and it has a number of bash-like behaviors to make you more productive. CommandBox also bundles several bash-like commands to give you a consistent shell regardless of whether you're on Windows or Linux.

Ctrl-C & Ctrl-D

Pressing Ctrl-C will send an interrupt signal to the terminal which will end any currently executing command and exit you back to the shell's prompt. Pressing Ctrl-C if you're already at the prompt won't do anything at all.

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

If you already have a Java JRE installed level 1.8 or higher (and set in your environment variables) you can the non-JRE version for your Operating System. If you don't have a JRE installed or aren't sure, we would recommend you the version with a JRE included. Below you will find the way to get the latest stable and bleeding edge releases. Please also note that in our page you will find much more detail information on how to install CommandBox with modern Operating System package managers as well.

Info The non-JRE versions are all around 80MB in size, while the embedded JRE versions will go up to 120MB in size.

Below you can see an image of the available downloads from the Ortus Solutions page:

This fixes a bug in the "update" and "outdated" commands that caused them to error after you had installed packages from an endpoint other than ForgeBox. Note, packages installed from HTTP(S) and Git endpoints will always show as outdated and will always update since those endpoints don't provide a way to know what version they're hosting without downloading the entire package anyway.

We also included a small enhancement to the Git endpoint to allow for authentication via public/private SSH keys. As long as you have a public key configured on your Git server and the private key is stored in ~/.ssh/ using a standard name, SSH-based clones should automatically authenticate. Please see for more info.

As always, the is located here:

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

• - Sept 2019

• - June 2019

CommandBox's true power comes from it's command-based architecture, but we also support just running plain-jane .cfm files as well.

Running plain CFML files

Take the following file for example:

test.cfm

Bug

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

Never miss an update again by installing the CommandBox update check module for ForgeBox. It will check for new versions of the core CommandBox CLI as well as any of your installed system modules once a day when the CLI starts up in interactive mode. Internet connection required.

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.

It is recommend to use Java 11, but there is preliminary support for Java 17. Keep in mind, not all CF engines support Java 17, so if you use it for the CLI, you may want to set your default server JRE to use Java 11.

Here are some common issues starting up CommandBox and troubleshooting help.

Could not load library. Reasons: [no jansi in java.library.path ... Access is denied]

If you have a Windows machine which has been locked down to not allow DLL files in the user's appData folder, you may receive a message similar to this when attempting to start CommandBox.

If you don't have the option of changing the security controls on your PC, then you can try changing your Windows environment variables of TMP and TEMP to repoint to another folder which does not have this restriction.

/usr/bin/box: 87: exec: java: not found

If you receive a message like the one above, which was taken from a Linux machine, when starting CommandBox, this means that you do not have Java installed. You can solve this in three ways: 1. Download the JRE-included CommandBox install which comes with a folder called jre 2. Download your own jre and place it in a folder called jre in the same folder as the box binary. 3. install Java onto your machine and ensure the correct JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME environment variables are set.

We believe all work and no play makes you a dull boy (or girl!). You'll notice the interactive shell has a handful of quotes and tips that show up when the shell starts. If you have ideas or suggestions for new ones, please send pull requests or let us know.

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're not familiar with how to view these, you want to "diverge" your eyes. This is what happens when you look at something far away and it's the opposite of crossing your eyes. Start with your face closer to the monitor and looking square on. Relax your vision and look past the monitor until the image starts to overlap itself (that's your eyes diverging) until the repeated elements match up again (like the clouds above). Different parts of the image will appear to be different distances away from you.

If you can't see it right away, don't worry. Practice makes perfect and the more you do it, the easier it is. You'll get the hang of it, we promise!

Do you also always type certain parameters every time you run a command, like always typing --force after rm? Any command parameter can be defaulted at a global level so you don't have to type it every time. These defaults will always be overridden if you actually supply the parameter when running the command.

config set command.defaults.rm.force=true
rm myFile.txt

The above example is the same as running rm myFile.txt --force since we've defaulted the force parameter to always be true when not otherwise specified. If you wanted to override your default, you could do so by actually specifying the parameter from the CLI like this:

rm myFile.txt --NoForce

Commands

CommandBox uses its own command parser that should be similar to what you're used to in other shells. Commands are not case-sensitive and don't contain any special characters except an occasional dash (-). Each command and its parameters will be entered on a single line. Press enter when you are done typing to execute that command. If you ever need to include a line break in a parameter value, quote the value and use the escape sequence.

For a full list of all the commands that ship with CommandBox as well as all their parameters and samples, please visit our Command API docs which are auto-generated each build.

Namespaces

To help organize our commands, we introduced the concept of namespaces. this means that commands can contain spaces and be comprised of more than one word. This is to keep things readable. Several commands that are all related will start with the same word, or namespace. An example of this is the namespace. It contains several commands inside of it including , , and . Calling each of them would look like this:

Hint the text artifacts itself is not a command and you will receive an error if you hit enter after just typing that text. Context-specific help is available for all namespaces by typing help after the namespace.

Namespaces can be more than one level. Another example would be which contains commands such as , , and .

Aliases

Commands can be aliased so you can call them more than one way, ever wanted to run an ls command in Windows or a dir command in Unix? . Check the or the CLI help command to see if a command has aliases. For instance, the command is aliases as q for quick typing. Another example would be the command that is aliased to just init.

The CommandBox interactive shell already allows for a command to pipe data into another Command.

cat myfile.txt | grep "find me"

Since CommandBox commands don't have a "standard input", the output of the previous command is passed into the second command as its first parameter. In this instance, the grep command's first parameter is called input so it receives the value returned by the cat command. The "find me" text becomes the second parameter-- in this case, expression.

Examples

There is nothing special about a parameter that can received piped input. In fact, any command can receive piped input for its first parameter. The following commands all accomplish the same thing.

This allows you to get creative by combining commands together like so:

This takes a package name and replaces some text on output. One benefit is that Windows users don't have a native sed command in their OS, but those commands inside a CommandBox Recipe will execute consistently on any machine.

Piping From The OS

What if you aren't using the interactive shell and you want to pipe into CommandBox from your OS's native shell? This is also supported, and as long as there is a command specified, the piped input will become the first parameter as before.

If you pipe text directly into the box executable with no command specified in the parameters, each line of your piped text will be read from the standard input as a command.

CommandBox is a Java-based tool that involves several pieces including native Java classes, CFML code, and the embedded Railo CLI. However, most changes are confined to the CFML code managed by WireBox. To determine what version you have installed, use the version command.

The auto-upgrade commands shown below will not upgrade the main CommandBox Java Binary. If there are any major upgrades to this binary, you will see a message that you will need to download the new Java binary and replace your current one.

Stable

To upgrade to the last stable version of the shell and commands, use the upgrade command.

This command will connect to our server to determine the last stable build. If there is an upgrade, it will be downloaded and installed for you.

Bleeding Edge

To upgrade to the bleeding edge version of the shell and commands, use the latest flag.

This command will connect to our server to determine the latest build. If there is an upgrade, it will be downloaded and installed for you.

Use The Force

If you already have the latest version installed, but you still want to force an upgrade, use the force parameter.

Brute Force

Note, if you delete your {user}/.CommandBox folder and re-run the executable, the version of CommandBox in the executable will be unpacked regardless of any upgrades you may have installed in the mean time. On that note, another way to force an upgrade is to simply download the new executable, wipe the .CommandBox folder in your user directory and re-run. This will also erase any saved command history, embedded servers, or installed user commands.

Mac/ *Unix

If you have used Hombrew to install CommandBox you must use Homebrew for any upgrade, minor or major. To upgrade CommandBox with Homebrew:

Linux Update

(Debian)

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

• Version 5.9.1 - August 2023

• Version 5.9.0 - May 2023

• - April 2023

• - December 2022

• - September 2022

• - May 2022

• - May 2022

• - October 2021

• - September 2021

• - August 2021

• - May 2021

• - Dec 2020

• - Nov 2020

• - June 2020

• - May 2020

• - Mar 2020

When a command has an argument with a type of Globber for a file path, that means you can use file globbing patterns to affect more than one file at a time. Globbing patterns are common in Bash as well as places like your .gitignore file. They use common wildcard patterns to provide a partial path that can match zero or hundreds of files all at the same time.

"?" matches a single character

If a globbing pattern contains a question mark, that will match any single character. So a pattern of ca?.txt would match car.txt, and cat.txt, but not cart.txt. You can use a wildcard more than once. p?p?.cf? would match files named papa.cfm and pipe.cfc.

"*" matches any number of characters within name

If a globbing pattern contains a single asterisks, that will match zero or more characters inside a filename or folder name. So d*o matches doodoo, dao, and just do. The wildcard only counts inside a file or folder name, so models/*.cfc will only match cfc files in the root of the models folder.

"**" matches any number of characters across all directories

To extend the previous example, if we did models/**.cfc that would match any cfc file in any subdirectory, no matter how deep.

Globbing examples

Here's some examples of what file globbing might look like:

Here's some more examples of how the wildcards work

Since the Globber library can handle more than one globbing pattern, any command that uses a Globber type can accept a comma-delimited list of patterns. The following will list any .cfm AND .md files in the directory.

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

• Version 3.9.0 - Nov 2017

• Version 3.8.0 - Aug 2017

• - Jul 2017

• - Mar 2017

• - Jan 2017

• - Nov 2016

• - Oct 2016

• - Jul 2016

• - Jul 2016

• - Feb 2016

• - Feb 2016

Help is integrated at every level in CommandBox. You can help global help, namespace help, or command help at any time.

Global Help

To get an overall list of all the commands you have available to run, simply type help at the shell.

Namespace Help

Next, drill down and get help on a specific namespace like server.

Command Help

And finally, get help on a single command such as server stop. We can see the command is also aliased as just stop as well as all the possible parameters and their types along with a few sample ways to call the command.

HTML Command API Docs

For a full list of all the commands that ship with CommandBox as well as all their paramaters and samples, please visit our which are auto-generated each build. This is the same information available to you via the help command, but in a searchable format you can browse outside of the CLI.

System Logs

Sometimes, you need to view the CommandBox log file. Maybe it is to debug a command you are writing or to . The system-log command outputs the path to the CommandBox log file. You can use it creatively by piping its output in to other commands:

Parameter values passed into a CommandBox command don't have to be static. Any part of the parameter which is enclosed in backticks (`) will be evaluated as a CommandBox expression. That means that the enclosed text will be first executed as though it were a separate command and the output will be substituted in its place.

Any valid command can be used as an expression, including calls to native OS binaries, CFML functions, or REPL one-liners. Note that any text that a command immediately flushes to the console during its execution (like a download progress bar) will not be returned by the expression, though it will display on the console.

Entire Parameter

Take for instance, this simple command that prints out the contents of a file:

It can be used as a dynamic parameter like so:

In the example above, the contents of the defaultServer.txt file will be passed in as the value of the "name" parameter to the "server start" command. If the contents of the file was the text myServer, the equivalent final command would be:

Inside Parameters

There can be more than one expression in a single parameter value. Expressions can also be combined with static text and they will all be evaluated in the order they appear:

That would output something similar to:

If you need to use an actual backtick in a parameter value, escape it with a backslash.

Which outputs

Express Yourself

This unlocks a new world of scripting potential when combined with other abilities like native OS binary execution and CFML functions from the CLI. Here's some examples to get your gears turning:

Set a package property in box.json equal to the current date passed through a CFML date mask

Set properties based on manipulations of previous values:

Perform CFML operations on local files:

Execute environment-aware install scripts based on local files. (isProduction.txt would contain the text true or false in this ex.)

Do you ever get tired of typing some built in commands and you'd like to just alias them as something simpler? You can create arbitrary alises now that reduce the amount of typing you do.

config set command.aliases.cca="coldbox create app"
cca myApp

In the above example, it's the same thing as typing coldbox create app myApp.

Aliases are treated as in-place shell expansions so you can alias anything including default parameters as well as multiple commands chained together.

config set command.aliases.foobar="echo brad | grep brad | sed s/rad/foo/ > foo.txt && cat foo.txt"
foobar

In the above example, typing foobar is the same as running the giant command string that's being set into the alias.

If you create an alias that matches an existing command name, your alias will take precedence since aliases are expanded before commands are resolved.

Here we can change the name of a common command like echo that we really wish had been named print.

Let's take it a step further and alias the alias!

Running cout brad is the same as running print brad which is the same as running echo brad. Try not to get dizzy when doing this, please.

Many Commands accept a path to a folder or file on your hard drive. You can specify a fully qualified path that starts at your drive root, or a relative path that starts in your current working directory. To find your current working directory, use the pwd command (Print Working Directory). To change your current working directory, use the cd command.

Absolute

Here are examples of fully qualified paths in Windows and *nix-based:

Windows:

Info Note that if you start a path with a single leading slash in Windows, it will be an absolute path using the drive letter of the current working directory.

*nix:

Relative

For a relative path, do not begin with a slash.

File system paths will be canonicalized automatically which means the following is also valid:

UNC Server paths

If you are on Windows, CommandBox supports UNC server shares bu accessing the name of the server or the IP address. Note, you can use forward or backslashes in Windows, but a UNC path MUST start with two backslashes.

Backslashes need to be escaped from the command line and in JSON, so most usage of UNC server paths will require you to type four slashes like \\\\ which will properly escape to \\

You cannot directly list the contents of a server like \\webdev01 as that is not a true directory. You always need to access a specific share like \\webdev01/webroot.

Permissions

By default, CommandBox will access UNC paths using the same permissions of the user that the box process was started with. There's no way to specify a user, so if you need to use a custom user, you'll need to run native NET USE command from the CLI first to change how it is authenticating. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of how Java accesses UNC paths so CommandBox has little control over it.

CommandBox has support for 256 colors in the console, but this is limited by the terminal in use. For instance, SSHing into a Linux server with PutTTY only supports 8 colors. Windows cmd only supports 16 colors. Most Mac terminals seem to support 256 colors by default.

For Windows users, we recommend using an add-on terminal like ConEMU which has good 256 color support out of the box. To find out how many colors your terminal supports, you can run this command:

system-colors

This will show you at the top how many colors are supported. It will also output a sample of each of the 256 colors. Terminals that support less than 256 colors will "round" down and show the next closest color automatically. Some darker colors might turn to black. Note, some advanced terminals allow the user to choose color themes which will also change the default colors. CommandBox has no control over how colors show up for you.

Color Names

The names and numbers of each color are unique and important if you want to do any Task Runners, custom commands that make use of these colors. Modules like Bullet Train also allow you to customize their colors. You can specify a color by its name like LightGoldenrod5 or its number (221).

In a Task Runner or custom command, the print helper would look like this:

Here's an example of customizing your Bullet Train module to use fancy colors. (Color 21 is Blue1)

This module will customize your CommandBox prompt while in the interactive shell. It has multiple "cars" that are part of the train and each car can contribute some output to the prompt that is working directory-aware.

THIS MODULE REQUIRES COMMANDBOX 4.0.0!

This project is based on the Zsh Bullet Train theme which is based on the Powerline shell prompt. The goal is to add in additional information to your prompt that is specific to the current working directory, or the last command you ran.

Installation

Install the module like so:

Fonts

This module uses some special Unicode characters to draw the prompt that may not be in your default terminal. You can turn off all Uniode chars and live with an uglier shell like so:

Or try a font like Consolas, DejaVu Sans Mono, or Fira Code. The best way to get all the characters to work is to install a "Powerline patched" font and set your terminal to use it. This may differ based on your operating system.

Here is a guide for setting a new font up to be used with the Windows cmd terminal:

For Windows users, we also recommend using ConEMU as your terminal.

Usage

You don't need to do anything special. Just continue to use the CommandBox interactive shell like you always do. You'll notice that the prompt is spanned across two lines and contains additional information. Cars that do not apply to the current directory will simply not be displayed. Familiarize yourself with what each bullet train "car" represents and soon you'll be using the data in the prompt without even thinking about it!

Customize it!

You can customize the cars that show, change the colors of existing cars and even create your own custom additions to Bullet Train. Read all about it in the readme of the Module homepage on ForgeBox.

Java 17 Support

Java 17 was a breaking change for Java users as it now blocks illegal reflective access. Both Adobe and Lucee have been slow to address this. Lucee 5.3.10 mostly seems to run on Java 17, but only the public beta of ColdFusion 2023 (Fortuna) supports Java 17. You may want to start testing Java 17 out, so the CommandBox CLI and its servers seem to have basic support for running on Java 17 now. Note, you may need to add additional JVM args to any servers based on the specific Java libraries you use.

Release Highlights

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

Offline Server Starts

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we got from the CommandBox 3.1 release was that it requires an Internet connection to start a server. Since you can specify the version of the server you want to start, including semver ranges like 5.x, this required a trip to ForgeBox to check and see what the best version match was since it might have changed since the last time you started the server.

Now, if you provide an exact CF engine version number (meaning you give us a major, minor, AND patch version) CommandBox will skip phoning home to ForgeBox and will just continue with that version.

Release Notes

Bug

We Love Lucee

The biggest feature is the switch-over from Railo to Lucee as the underlying CLI engine that powers the REPL and commands. The embedded server now also runs Lucee 4.5 as well. If you require a Railo embedded server, you will need to stay on CommandBox 1.1.1 for now.

Release Notes

Bug

You can already execute CFML functions in the REPL command to play in a sandbox, but sometimes you want to go further and actually use CFML directly in the CLI. This is where the cfml command comes in handy. The following runs the now() function. It is the equivalent to repl now().

#function

As a handy shortcut, you can invoke the

If you are just installing CommandBox to use on your PC as a local development tool, the standard version of the box binary should be fine. It contains a full version of Lucee with all its default extensions pre-installed. However, if you are creating an automation or a distributable such as a Docker container you may want to look into one of these alternative box binaries.

CommandBox Light

CommandBox Light does not include the full version of Lucee, but rather Lucee Light which only comes with the Compress extension (because CommandBox requires this extension to run). The CommandBox Light binary is roughly half the size of the normal version. The on-disk size of the CommandBox home is about 1/3rd of the size. This can be handy for places where disk size is very important.

Specifying a max heap size for your embedded server

And finally, the ability to install packages from a Git repo is here!

And this nice shortcut for installing from GitHub:

If you've not used CommandBox yet, check out our getting started guide here:

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 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.

The following environment variables will be available to your command

• watcher_added - A JSON array of relative paths added in the watch directory

There is a sql command which will accept any sort of data as JSON, marshal 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.

Parameters

If a value is a single word with no special characters, you don't need to escape anything. Certain characters are reserved as special characters though for parameters since they demarcate the beginning and end of the actual parameter and you'll need to escape them properly. These rules apply the same to named and positional parameters.

Spaces

If a parameter has any white space in it, you'll need to wrap the value in single or double quotes. It doesn't matter which kind you use and it can vary from one parameter to another as long as they match properly.

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 powerful construct allows you to perform basic loops from the CLI over arbitrary input. Most of the examples show file listings, but any input can be used that you want to iterate over.

This example will use the echo command to output each filename returned by ls. The echo is called once for every line of output being piped in.

The default command is "echo" but you can perform an action against the incoming list of items. This example will use "cat" to output the contents of each file in the incoming list.

You can customize the delimiter. This example passes a hard-coded input and spits it on commas. So here, the

Check Out The New Stuff

The notable updates include:

• Updated version of JBoss Undertow, which contains security fixes

• Updated version of Lucee to 5.3.10 which also contains library security updates

• New "artifacts prune" command to remove older artifacts that haven't been used recently

• Improved "upgrade" command which can also update new jars (you'll be able to use this in the NEXT update!)

• Support for PFX cert file for server SSL

And here are the full release notes:

New Feature

update coldbox resources to support api resources

artifacts prune command

Bug

Use user.home instead of user.dir to test case sensitivity

Cursor position get's off-track when using a multiselect with content that exceeds the terminal size

ModCFML doesn't save actual Lucee webConfigDir

Runwar server's regex path info filter doesn't take servlet context into account

Two servers get same name when moving folder

Can't pass Windows drive letter to "open" command

Error passing empty version to "java search" command

Interactive job logs don't obey terminal width config setting

REPL errors when representing some Java objects

recipe file validation fails

Java integration doesn't recognize ARM CPUs

coldbox resources command failing on relative models directory not found

Improvement

make "upgrade" command handle new jars

Support pfx format for server certs

Have fileAppend (>>) and fileWrite (>) commands create missing parent directories

REPL obey verboseErrors config setting

cfpm doesn't find Adobe server with different web root

Make client cert CGI vars available immediately after SSL renegotiation

Add --json to artifacts list

Touch artifacts on use so we can prune unused ones easier

Update coldbox resources command to latest version

Task

Update bundled JRE to 11.0.17+8

Update Undertow lib in Runwar

Update json-smart-mini and Lucee libs

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

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.

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.

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:

Release Notes

Here are the release notes for the 5.2.1 release.

Bug

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

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

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

New Feature

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

• [] - forgebox logout command

Improvement

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

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

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

Iterate over JSON with foreach command

The foreach command which was introduced recently and allows you to iterate over any list of input and run a command using each item in the list has been enhanced to also allow you to iterate from the CLI over any JSON string that you pipe in.

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/usage/foreach-command#iterating-over-json

Directory Watchers have more data

Now when you create a directory watcher in a task runner or custom command, you can not only get notified when something in that directory changes, but you also now receive a list of files added, removed, and modified.

New "coldbox watch-reinit" command

Thanks to Scott Steinbeck, we have a new command called coldbox watch-reinit. This will watch for changes to certain files in your project and will automatically issue a framework reinit when you edit things like configs or services.

Color all the JSONs

Thanks to John Berquist, CommandBox now has sweet color coding any time it outputs JSON to the screen. Try it out by running something like "server show".

Users can also customize the colors they see for JSON with the following config settings:

• json.ansiColors.constant

• json.ansiColors.key

• json.ansiColors.number

Setting values can be any color name from the system-colors command.

New Gist endpoint

Thanks to Jason Steinshouer we have a new Gist endpoint for installing code from a public Gist.

4.4.0 Release Notes

Bug

• [] - testbox watcher shows error when test fail

• [] - Tab complete doesn't work on param values with spaces

• [] - Long lines wrap in interactive jobs

New Feature

• [] - Allow watcher access to files that were added, removed, updated

• [] - coldbox watch-reinit command

• [] - Color code JSON on console output by default

Improvement

• [] - Refresh any salt values when deploying a new CF engine.

• [] - Add Gist endpoint

• [] - Change update behavior of GIT and URL endpoints to use semver in path if present

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

New Feature

• [] - allow bump Git tag to have custom prefix

Improvement

• [] - testbox create bdd include describe and it block

• [] - Allow server list to filter partial server names

• [] - Sort tab completion options

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-962] - 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