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Commands doc

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Domain
cli, documentation

Research direction

Start by downloading the latest All GA Features archive, extracting it, and reviewing the help output for featureUtility, springBootUtility, auditUtility, and serverSchemaGen from wlp/bin. Add documentation for the prioritized commands, ensuring the documented command-line help matches the runtime help; the issue leaves the remaining commands out of scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

epic

There are other commands than just the ones we've documented so far. I don't know how urgent it is to document them all (they all have commandline help anyway) but just so you know...

Here's the full list of the commands in OL 20.0.0.12 (the .bat files are for Windows, the ones without suffix are for UNIX/Linux, etc):

laura@Lauras-MacBook-Pro openliberty-200012 % ls wlp/bin 
auditUtility		binaryLog		ddlGen			jaxb			pluginUtility.bat	securityUtility.bat	serverSchemaGen.bat
auditUtility.bat	binaryLog.bat		ddlGen.bat		jaxrs			productInfo		server			springBootUtility
batchManager		client			featureUtility		jaxws			productInfo.bat		server.bat		springBootUtility.bat
batchManager.bat	client.bat		featureUtility.bat	pluginUtility		securityUtility		serverSchemaGen		tools

To find them:

  1. Download the latest "All GA Features" zip from https://www.openliberty.io/downloads/
  2. Extract the zip file into a directory on your laptop (I created a dir called openliberty-200012).
  3. At a command prompt/terminal, move into Liberty's bin directory, eg: cd openliberty-200012/wlp/bin
  4. List the contents of the bin directory: ls
    And there you go.

You can get the help for any of the commands by typing the command's name followed by --help, eg: ./binaryLog --help. You'll see some commands you recognise in there, like server, and securityUtility.

The text in this cmdline help should match the text in the OL docs (if you add the help to the OL docs).

For extra credit (and ease of maintenance), rather than duplicating and keeping in sync, ideally someone would create something to generate the your asciidoc pages from the runtime help files according to some template you define. And then you could raise a PR to fix up the wording in the commandline help in future if you want changes to it for style or whatever.

Update on what I've said above after speaking with Alasdair:

  • the online help for the commands should be good enough that we won't lose anything if not all the commands are documented
  • of the commands in Open Liberty, it would be good to doc the following ones:
    • featureUtility
    • springBootUtility
    • auditUtility
  • I'll add to that the serverSchemaGen command, which he's previously said is useful. Info is currently only in the KC I raised an issue on the runtime to get that fixed.
  • all the other commands are low priority

I think if we consider the scope of this issue's work to just be those three commands, rather than all of them, it's probably ok to manually add them to the docs (rather than trying to get them generated automatically, which would take a fair amount of work, including working out a template of how the info should look etc). Leave the rest of the commands (if there's a need in future, the info is in the online help anyway).

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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