Here's a quick post on a somewhat-undocumented feature of CommandBox.  I say "somewhat" because if you type "config set" and hit tab from the interactive shell, we'll auto-suggest this setting, so it's not impossible to find but I've not put it in the official docs.

So, here's the setup.  You can pretty much do anything you want with the ForgeBox website entirely through the CLI.  That includes creating accounts, logging in, publishing packages, updating packages, listing packages, and searching packages.  This is made possible by our nice (Coldbox-powered) REST API that's part of the ForgeBox site that the CLI interfaces with.  

Sometimes you may wish to play around and try out the commands to create users and packages, but you hate to create a lot of dummy data that clogs up the database or shows on your profile.  The fix is to point your local CommandBox CLI over to our staging instance of ForgeBox.  This is as simple as setting a single config setting from the command line and the change takes instant effect for all your ForgeBox interactions.  Just remember, this setting is remembered until you change it back so don't forget.  

To activate your own staging playground, run the following command:

CommandBox> config set endpoints.forgebox.APIURL=http://forgebox.stg.ortussolutions.com/api/v1

That's it!  All ForgeBox interactions including creating users, publishing packages, installing packages, and searching for packages will all be directed at our staging server.  If you want to visit the stage version of ForgeBox in your browser, the URL is http://forgebox.stg.ortussolutions.com/

Please remember:

  • This is not a production server and could go down at any time without notice
  • This database is a somewhat-recent backup and won't contain all the latest packages and versions that production has
  • We might delete this data at any time without warning.  (If you need to perform tests, feel free to let us know and we'll accommodate you)
  • Your account password and API key might not be the same as production if you changed it recently
  • Don't forget to point your install back to the production ForgeBox instance when you're done playing.

To revert your CommandBox install to the default production URL, simply run this command:

CommandBox> config clear endpoints.forgebox.APIURL