Ably CLI

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The Ably CLI brings the full power of Ably to your terminal. You can use it to manage your Ably account and its resources, and to explore Ably's APIs and features.

It's a quick and easy way to simulate additional clients when testing how Ably works.

The Ably CLI interacts with:

The Control API to manage your Ably account and applications.
Pub/Sub to publish and subscribe to messages in realtime.
Chat to send messages, display typing indicators and react to what's happening in a chat room.
Spaces to enter spaces and register member locations.

Installation

The Ably CLI is available as an NPM package.

Install the Ably CLI:

npm install -g @ably/cli

Run the following to log in to your Ably account. This will prompt you to log into your Ably account and setup an access token for the Ably CLI. You can then set the default app and API key to use back in your terminal instance:

ably login

Start running commands in the CLI to create and interact with your Ably resources.

Usage

After you have successfully authenticated and chosen your app and API key, you're ready to interact with Ably resources directly from your terminal.

For example, open two terminal instances and subscribe to one, and publish messages in the other:

To subscribe:

ably channels subscribe channel-1

To publish:

# To publish 1 message:
ably channels publish channel-1 Hi!

# To publish 5 messages:
ably channels publish --count 5 channel-1 "Message number {{.Count}}"

For a list of all available commands, run:

ably help

Feature set

You can use the Ably CLI for undertaking operations such as:

Operation	Description
Ably Accounts
List accounts	List the accounts you have access to.
Switch accounts	Switch between multiple Ably accounts.
Account statistics	Query your account statistics.
Ably Apps
List apps	List all apps in your account.
Switch apps	Switch between multiple apps.
Manage apps	Create and delete apps.
Manage API keys	Create, update and revoke API keys in an app.
App statistics	Query app statistics.
Manage rules	Create, update and delete rules in an app.
Logs	Query and subscribe to logs.
Integrations and Queues
Manage integrations	List, create and delete integrations.
Manage queues	List, create and delete queues.
Pub/Sub
List channels	List active channels in an app.
Publish	Publish and batch publish messages.
Subscribe	Subscribe to messages on channels.
Presence	Enter and subscribe to the presence set of channels.
History	Query message history.
Occupancy	Fetch and subscribe to channel occupancy.
Chat
List rooms	List chat rooms in an app.
Messages	Send and subscribe to messages.
Presence	Enter and subscribe to the presence set of chat rooms.
History	Query chat message history.
Occupancy	Fetch and subscribe to chat room occupancy.
Reactions	Send and subscribe to message-level and room-level reactions.
Typing indicators	Send and subscribe to typing indicators.
Spaces
List spaces	List spaces in an app.
Members	Enter and subscribe the list of members.
Locations	Set and subscribe to member locations.
Cursors	Set and subscribe to member cursors.
Locks	Acquire and subscribe to locks.