Even more CLI tool updates!

I know, I know: we’ve been doing this a lot lately. We just want to keep you updated on our command line tool, which we think is one of the most important things that we offer to developers wanting to use AppFog.

The changes are subtle but powerful:

1. Push and update changes only rather than the whole directory

When you run the af update or af push command on existing apps, the CLI tool now updates only new and changed files rather than the entire project directory. The larger the app, the more time this will save. This is something that many of you asked for directly, and we’re happy to finally offer you this capability.

One of the cool under-the-hood details: our developer Larry Hitchon, who has really been crushing it these days with his af gem updates, was able to configure things in such a way that when a push/update hits the Cloud Foundry back end, the server can tell if it has seen the file already.

A direct side effect of this is that if a file has already been uploaded even by someone else, say jQuery or a Java .jar file, it doesn’t have to load those files from your directory. It can use the file in the Cloud Foundry cache instead. Yet another efficiency gain that could save you time upon deployment and updating.

As always, in order to use this new functionality, you just need to update your af Ruby gem:

sudo gem update af

2. New infrastructures now accessible with gem updates

In the future, you will no longer have to update the af gem in order to get a list of or to use all available infrastructures. If we add a new infrastructure (and we will be adding some very soon), you can deploy, push, or update to that infrastructure without having to update anything on your machine. This is a big improvement because it means that the list of infrastructures is no longer hard-coded into specific versions of the af gem.

Stay tuned for more changes!

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