Arduino Extends Its Command Line Interface to Include Cloud Capabilities
Designed to allow for easier management and deployment without the need to learn the API, the Arduino Cloud CLI is now available.
The Arduino team has announced a new string to the Arduino Command Line Interface (CLI) bow: the ability to interact with the Arduino Cloud platform, as an alternative to using the web interface or application programming interface (API).
"With the new Cloud CLI tool it is possible to perform most of the tasks that can be done using the web interface," the Arduino team explains. "Devices and things can be created, deleted and listed. Things can be bound to devices. In a very similar way it is possible to manage the dashboards. OTA [Over The Air] firmware updates can also be performed with the ability to defer the update up to one week. It is also possible to perform a mass OTA upload through a specific command."
Arduino launched its command line interface four years ago, as a way to better manage Arduino projects from headless or automated environments. Since its release the capabilities of the Arduino CLI have only grown, most recently gaining support for build profiles as a way of preventing dependency rot from rendering older projects un-compilable.
The extension to support Arduino Cloud actions, though, represents the biggest change in capabilities yet. Through the Arduino Cloud CLI, users will be able to not only manage individual projects and devices but scale up easily — using scripting to handle everything from testing out prototypes to keeping a fleet of devices up-to-date or managing dashboards.
"One of the key features," the Arduino team adds, "is the ability to download in different text formats (JSON, YAML, …) the templates of the dashboards, devices and things, so that you can keep them for future use. It is very useful to modify them to create copies of the entities with some properties changed and upload the new templates to the [Arduino] Cloud."
More details on the Arduino CLI Cloud are available on the project's GitHub repository, where pre-compiled binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux on x86, AMD64, and Arm are available alongside the source code under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.
