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Helidon CLI

The Helidon CLI lets you easily create a Helidon project by picking from a set of archetypes.

It also supports a developer loop that performs continuous compilation and application restart, so you can easily iterate over source code changes.

Create a New Project

helidon init

Then answer the questions.

Developer Loop

cd myproject
helidon dev

As you make source code changes the project will automatically recompile and restart your application.

Implementation Notes

  • impl: implementation of the Helidon CLI. Uses harness, codegen and plugin
  • harness: a general purpose CLI harness
  • codegen: annotation processor for harness
  • plugin: code that would normally be in impl, but to reduce native image bloat it is included as a jar in the native image and executed by extracting the jar on disk and spawning a java process.

Issue #849 and related PR #905 added a prompt with a list of available Helidon versions to choose from for Helidon CLI init command. As a result the previous approach was changed when user had to choose the default version of Helidon or typed some other one.

For versions 3.0.4 or less

The site release creates a latest file containing the latest Helidon version number: https://helidon.io/cli-data/latest.

User has to choose the default version of Helidon or types some other one when Helidon CLI init command is used.

For versions after 3.0.4

The latest file was replaced by versions.xml file that contains information about archetypes versions: https://helidon.io/cli-data/versions.xml.

User has to choose the version of Helidon from the list of available versions when Helidon CLI init command is used.

cli-data.zip: archetypes, catalog and metadata.properties

The archetypes used by the CLI (for init command) are maintained in the main Helidon repository and published as part of a Helidon release: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/io/helidon/archetypes/

The archetypes along with an index are published to Maven as a catalog: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/io/helidon/archetypes/helidon-archetype-catalog/

As part of the helidon-site build a file called metadata.properies is generated that contains information about versions:

  • build-tools.version: Version of helidon-maven-plugin to use. Only used by CLI versions 2.0.2 and earlier.
  • cli.version: Version of the latest CLI binaries. Used to determine if there is an upgrade available.
  • cli.latest.plugin.version: Version of the helidon-cli-maven-plugin to use for versions > 2.0.2

Note that the last two can be different if, for example, we choose to release CLI binaries without doing a full build-tools release.

The site build bundles metadata.properties along with the archetype catalog into cli-data.zip.

This file is hosted on helidon.io. For example: https://helidon.io/cli-data/2.2.2/cli-data.zip

CLI's use of cli-data.zip

If needed the CLI downloads cli-data.zip and extracts the data into ~/.helidon/cache. It now has access to the archetype catalog from the local disk.

Before versions 3.x

When the cli starts up it determines the version of Helidon to use. The user might have passed the version, or the CLI might use the latest by inspecting https://helidon.io/cli-data/latest.

Since versions 3.x

When the cli starts up it inspects https://helidon.io/cli-data/versions.xml and gets information about all available versions of Helidon. After that it proposes to the user the latest major versions of Helidon and the default one. User can choose one of them or look at all available versions and choose the required one.

CLI Configuration

Configuration for the cli is stored in ~/.helidon/config.