Jan 06, 2020

New FOSS cli tools and services discovered in 2019

There are many essential cli tools for the everyday use. And from time to time even better, newer tools arrive :) Reasons may be a nicer interface, better features or just making you more productive.

The following cli tools have been discovered by myself and replaced some long used and designated cli tools on my computer:

curlie

An intuitiv http client

https://github.com/rs/curlie

Curlie brought back having fun to work with web requests and responses on the cli. It's very intuitive and handy; the colored output helps to better read the received data and the parameters are positioned and named in a useful manner. It totally replaced curl for me.

Note: curlie is heavily inspired by httpie. So httpie is also worth having a look :)

hey

Sends some heavy load to your webservice

https://github.com/rakyll/hey

This small tools replaced apache benchmark (ab) for me. It's also very easy to use and displays well formatted benchmark results.

caddy

A webserver written in go with intuitiv configuration syntax and built-in lets-encrypt ssl

https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy

When I started using caddy in 2018 I was blown away by it's built-in lets-encrpyt-support. No more trouble with self-issuing-certificates or renewing lets-encrypt-certificates… all is done by caddy :)

Besdides that, caddy has a beautiful and simple configuration syntax. Start with a simple directive (which covers 90% of all cases) but getting more specific with your configuration is very easy.

It replaced almost all apache and nginx services for me. Since version 2, caddy can be configured with a json api. I haven't used the api, yet - but the feature itself looks very promising .