From Lumber to Toolbelt: new CLI changes on Forest Admin

While using Forest Admin can be completely done in a no-code, hands-off manner, setting up your internal tool through it, or implementing advanced features still requires some low-code work in our command line interfaces (CLI).

In the past, Forest Admin used to have two of these: Lumber for the onboarding phase, where our users set up Forest, and the Forest Toolbelt for the development phase, where they would work on the setups they’ve created. These two tools worked in synergy to help users create the best internal tool possible through Forest, but there’s always room to do more for our users — which is why we’ve decided to simplify things, and make the Toolbelt our all-in-one CLI tool for both onboarding and development.

With this change, all of Lumber’s functionality has been integrated into the Toolbelt — which means from now on, users will only have to use one tool, and will have a much smoother onboarding experience and learning curve. Of course, this also means that while users can technically still install and use Lumber at the moment, we will be discontinuing support for it, and want to encourage all our community members to switch over to Toolbelt.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at all the new functionality that Toolbelt got from Lumber with this change.

Installation

First of all, let’s take a look at how we can get started with the new CLI functionalities. Users can install Toolbelt using the following command.

command npm install -g forest-cli@latest -s

If you’ve installed the Lumber CLI in the past using the "npm install -g lumber-cli@latest -s" command, you can uninstall it whenever you wish, as the new Toolbelt version now has all the features of Lumber.

You can uninstall Lumber using the following command:

npm uninstall -g lumber-cli

Admin Microservice API creation

Instead of the "lumber generate" we used in Lumber for this purpose, the new command to create an admin microservice API project in Toolbelt is going to be:

forest projects:create <YourSuperAdminProjectName> --databaseConnectionURL <YourDatabaseUrl> --applicationHost "localhost" --applicationPort "3310"

Admin Microservice update

Instead of "lumber update", like we used to have in Lumber, users can update their admin microservice API project according to their updated database schema with the following command:

forest schema:update 

For a full tutorial on what you can do with Toolbelt, and for all the commands used with it, don't forget to visit our complete CLI documentation.

Got any questions, or anything you wish we’d add to our existing CLI functionalities? Don’t forget to reach out to us on our Developers Community, or send us a message on Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin.