Developing for Zowe CLI

You can extend Zowe CLI by developing plug-ins and contributing code to the base Zowe CLI or existing plug-ins.

How can I contribute?

You can contribute to Zowe CLI in the following ways:

1. Add new commands, options, or other improvements to the base CLI.
2. Develop a plug-in that users can install to Zowe CLI.

You might want to contribute to Zowe CLI to accomplish the following:

• Provide new scriptable functionality for yourself, your organization, or to a broader community.
• Make use of Zowe CLI infrastructure (profiles and programmatic APIs).
• Participate in the Zowe CLI community space.

The following plug-ins have been developed:

• Zowe CLI Plug-in for IBM Db2
• Zowe CLI Plug-in for IBM CICS

Getting started

If you want to start working with the code immediately, check out the Zowe CLI core repository and the contribution guidelines. The zowe-cli-sample-plugin GitHub repository is a sample plug-in that adheres to the guidelines for contributing to Zowe CLI projects.

Tutorials

Follow these tutorials to get started working with the sample plug-in:

1. Setting up - Clone the project and prepare your local environment.
2. Installing a plug-in - Install the sample plug-in to Zowe CLI and run as-is.
3. Extending a plug-in - Extend the sample plug-in with a new by creating a programmatic API, definition, and handler.
4. Creating a new plug-in - Create a new CLI plug-in that uses Zowe CLI programmatic APIs and a diff package to compare two data sets.
5. Implementing user profiles - Implement user profiles with the plug-in.

Plug-in Development Overview

At a high level, a plug-in must have imperative-framework configuration (sample here). This configuration is discovered by imperative-framework through the package.json imperative key.

A Zowe CLI plug-in will minimally contain the following:

1. Programmatic API - Node.js programmatic APIs to be called by your handler or other Node.js applications.
2. Command definition - The syntax definition for your command.
3. Handler implementation - To invoke your programmatic API to display information in the format that you defined in the definition.

The following guidelines and documentation will assist you during development:

Imperative CLI Framework Documentation

Imperative CLI Framework documentation is a key source of information to learn about the features of Imperative CLI Framework (the code framework that you use to build plug-ins for Zowe CLI). Refer to these supplementary documents during development to learn about specific features such as:

• Auto-generated help
• JSON responses
• User profiles
• Logging, progress bars, experimental commands, and more!

Contribution Guidelines

The Zowe CLI contribution guidelines contain standards and conventions for developing Zowe CLI plug-ins.

The guidelines contain critical information about working with the code, running/writing/maintaining automated tests, developing consistent syntax in your plug-in, and ensuring that your plug-in integrates with Zowe CLI properly:

For more information about ...	See:
General guidelines that apply to contributing to Zowe CLI and Plug-ins	Contribution Guidelines
Conventions and best practices for creating packages and plug-ins for Zowe CLI	Package and Plug-in Guidelines
Guidelines for running tests on Zowe CLI	Testing Guidelines
Guidelines for running tests on the plug-ins that you build	Plug-in Testing Guidelines
Versioning conventions for Zowe CLI and Plug-ins	Versioning Guidelines