SearchThe CLI talks with Varnish Controller via the REST API but presents the output in a human readable
fashion. Most resources can be output as JSON from the CLI using the inspect flag (supported by
most resource types).
When working with the CLI the ID of different resources is used to identify which resources to
combine and use. Most CLI commands also support a -v flag to show a verbose output. Most commands
also support filtering with the --filter flag.
Note that when using filter to commands, it will require the filter to specify the attribute such as
--filter "name=*tag*" for tags that have the attribute name. But for Domains that have the
attribute FQDN the filter would be --filter "FQDN=*example*". Filtering supports wildcard
annotated with a *. Filters can be used as a way of specifying resources without an ID and also
perform actions toward multiple resources at the same time.
Sorting output is possible using filter (-f/--filter) with sort keyword, e.g -f sort=timestamp:desc using desc or asc or descending for ascending sorting.
Pagination is also possible using filtering keyword take=<entries>,<offset>. E.g. -f take=10,2
will take 10 entries, skipping first 2.
It is also possible to filter using [gte] (greater or equal) and [lte] (lower or equal) to
filter out results. E.g. to filter all agents running on Varnish port lower or equal to 8082: -f varnish_port[lte]=8082.
The VCLI supports JSON output instead of ASCII table. Specifying -j to a command will print the
result as JSON output. The JSON output will be the table in JSON format. Hence, the keys in the JSON
objects will be the header names with stripped spaces.
Comma separated values (CSV) are also supported by the CLI by specifying --csv to the command.
This will print the table in a CSV format. Note that this is the CLI presented table in CSV format,
not an actual API response in CSV format.
If the API-GW is run with self-signed certificates, the CLI will complain about the certificates if
the root CA certificate is missing on the system. In order to login to such configured API-GW there
are two options. The preferred option is to specify the root CA certificate for the self-signed
certificate. This can be done using the flag --ca <root_ca.pem> to the login command. The other
alternative is to not validate the certificate at all, using the --insecure flag to the login
command. The latter is not preferred as this is not secure.
Both these options can be specified using environment variables, VARNISH_CONTROLLER_CLI_INSECURE
and VARNISH_CONTROLLER_CLI_CA.
To collect debug information for the whole Varnish Controller system the CLI can be used.
# Upload a system wide JSON dump to filebin.varnish-software.com
# Link is output once uploaded
vcli debug -u ZD1234
# Output the debug information to a file
vcli debug --file debug.json
The call takes about 5 seconds to complete. This is in order to gather information about all components in the system. The debug information contains last API logs, information about database, memory, CPU, network information, average API call time from API-GW and license information.
The CLI supports ANSI color configuration. This is a manual setup which requires edit of the configuration file.
The configuration file is typically found at ~/.vcli.yml. To enable colors, add the following to
the end of the configuration file:
color:
enabled: true
header: 36 #cyan
even: 34 #blue
odd: 32 #green
Color definitions can be found here (using the FG color codes).
Many of the CLI commands have aliases to shorten the command lengths. Each command has a help page
that can be viewed by running vcli [command] -h.
Online cli command documentation can be found here