Command Line Interface

The FIREWHEEL Command Line Interface (CLI) allows interaction with and management of FIREWHEEL. The CLI (cli/firewheel_cli.py) uses Python’s cmd module. However, there is one notable difference: the CLI is designed to work with a FIREWHEEL cluster which means that commands may need to be executed on one or many hosts. To accomplish this, the CLI has been extended with Helpers. Helpers do not use the standard Cmd format, but they enable us to use Python and Shell scripting to perform various actions across the cluster (see Executors). The CLI automatically distributes Helpers to enable performing actions over the entire cluster. Therefore, the CLI may be accessed from any node in the cluster. The distinction between commands and Helpers is not relevant for most users so we will use these terms interchangeably. CLI commands may output error message to the screen, but remote commands will indicate an error through a non-zero exit code.