We are pleased to announce the release of CommandBox 5.4.0.  A minor update containing 30 bug fixes and enhancements that has been 3 months in the making.  Our focus for this release was cleaning up some rough edges left from the 5.3.x enhancements, improvements to the CLI to support the latest modules, and enhancements to automation around environment variables.  

Details

The docs are updated and available here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/

The downloads are here:

https://www.ortussolutions.com/products/commandbox#download

New Stuff

Here's an overview of some of the more notable changes in this release.

web.xml Overrides

When you start an Adobe or Lucee CF Engine, the WAR CommandBox uses has a stock web.xml baked into it.  Sometimes you may want to add custom servlets, servlet mappings, etc into your server.  You can override the stock web.xml in part or in total with a file of your own which you specify in the server.json like so:

{
  "app" : {
    "webXMLOverride" : "path/to/web-override.xml"
  }
}

More info here: 

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/embedded-server/configuring-your-server/web.xml-overrides

Funky Parameters

In addition to quoting parameter values, parameter names can also be quoted.  This is useful when setting keys into settings or JSON files that have spaces, hyphens or special characters.  Each of these examples are now supported:

# quoted string
package set foo."bar.baz"=bum

# bracketed string
package set foo[bar.baz]=bum

# quoted, bracketed string
package set foo["bar.baz"]=bum

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/usage/parameters

Library updates

Lucee Server has been updated to 5.3.8.201 and JBoss Undertow has been updated to 2.2.10.Final.  The Lucee update, as usual, applies to the CLI as well as the default server you get when you run server start.

Smarter Jar Endpoint

When you install a Jar via HTTP URL and the version number is baked into the URL, the jar endpoint now makes more assumptions about what the version of the package is that allows it to optimize the update checks and eliminate unnecessary downloads. 

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/package-management/code-endpoints/jar-via-http#semantic-versioning

ask and confirm commands

Here are some fun commands for user interactivity in the shell.  You can use these as part of a recipe or a nice "one-liner".

ask

The ask command is similar to the ask() method in Task Runners.  It requires an interactive terminal and will ask the user a question and return their answer.  It is meant to be changed with other commands.

set color=`ask "favorite Color? "`
echo "you said ${Setting: color not found}"

or with default values

ask question="Who is cool? " defaultResponse="Balbino!"

or with masked input

ask question="What is your password? " mask=*

Or fun stuff like this

ask "Secret phrase: " | assertEqual "mockingbird" || echo "access denied!" && exit 1

confirm

The confirm command will ask the user a yes/no question and return a passing or failing exit code from the command based on the answer.

confirm "do you want to update your packages? " && update

Remember the && operator will only execute the second command if the first command returns an exit code of 0.

More info here:

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/helpful-commands/ask-and-confirm

server prune command

You can easily forget all servers which have not been started for a certain period of time with the server prune command.  It accepts the number of days that need to have passed since a server was last started in order to prune it.

server prune days=30

# Skip the confirmation check
server prune --force

More info here: 

https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/embedded-server/manage-servers#prune-old-servers

Release Notes

Here are the full release notes for CommandBox 5.4.0

Bug