devex-cli

Development Experience command line tools. Automating away the development gruntwork.

Installing

The devex tool is built for two operating systems Linux and macOS. Each release on this repository provides binaries for these two operating systems. To install the tool, either download the binary from the latest release, make it executable and place it on a reachable path; or use brew.

brew install miguelaferreira/tools/devex-cli

Documentation

The usage of the tool is documented at https://miguelaferreira.gitbook.io/devex/devex-cli/overview.

Development

Setup

SDKMAN automates the process of installing and upgrading SDKs, namely Java SDKs. Install it via:

curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash

Then install GraalVM Community Edition for Java 25 (the project baseline):

sdk install java 25.0.2-graalce

Load the installed GraalVM in the current terminal:

sdk use java 25.0.2-graalce

Modern GraalVM ships native-image out of the box, so no extra installation step is needed.

You should be ready to build the tool.

Build with Gradle

Gradle (9.x) is configured to build both executable jars and GraalVM native images. Tests require a GitLab token with read_api scope and a GitHub token with read:org + repo scope. The tokens are picked up from the environment variables GITLAB_TOKEN and GITHUB_TOKEN. Tests can be skipped with -x test, in which case the tokens are not needed.

A subset of integration tests clones real repositories over SSH and is only run when DEVEX_SSH_INTEGRATION_TESTS=true is set. They require either a passphraseless SSH key authorised on gitlab.com / github.com, or an ssh-agent with the relevant keys already loaded. CI sets this env var automatically. Locally these tests are skipped by default.

To build an executable jar run the gradle task build:

GITLAB_TOKEN="..." GITHUB_TOKEN="..." ./gradlew clean build

The executable jar is created under build/libs/ (e.g. devex-VERSION-all.jar). To execute that jar run java:

java -jar build/libs/devex-*-all.jar -h

To build a GraalVM native binary run the nativeCompile gradle task:

GITLAB_TOKEN="..." GITHUB_TOKEN="..." ./gradlew clean nativeCompile

The binary will be created under build/native/nativeCompile/devex. To execute the native binary run it:

build/native/nativeCompile/devex -h

GraalVM native-image notes

Reflection / serialization metadata for third-party libraries is provided by the GraalVM Reachability Metadata repository, which the Micronaut Gradle plugin wires in automatically. The few classes that need build-time initialisation (org.apache.sshd, org.slf4j, ch.qos.logback, org.xml.sax) are declared in the graalvmNative block of build.gradle. There is no longer a need to manually run the JVM agent to capture configuration.