The Heroku CLI's API Workflow

Ever wondered how the Heroku command line client accomplishes its work? We don’t talk about it much, but the Heroku CLI isn’t a black box, it’s a fairly thin consumer of our own RESTful API, and that means everything you do in your day to day workflow on Heroku is available to work with in a programmatic fashion. The CLI even uses our own implementation of the API library called heroku.rb (and by the way, heroku.rb is a great choice if you want to consume the API from Ruby).

A handy tool that we use here regularly is inspecting the CLI’s workflow by telling Excon to send its output to standard out. Try it for yourself:

EXCON_STANDARD_INSTRUMENTOR=true heroku list

Any calls that are implemented via heroku.rb make their requests using Excon, but a few of the older endpoints still use Restclient. If you run into one of these, you can do something very similar:

RESTCLIENT_LOG=stdout heroku drains -a mutelight

Posted on July 9, 2012 from San Francisco

About

My name is Brandur. I'm a polyglot software engineer and part-time designer working at Heroku in San Francisco, California. I'm a Canadian expat. My name is Icelandic. Drop me a line at brandur@mutelight.org.

Aside from technology, I'm interested in energy and how it relates to our society, travel, longboarding, muay thai, symphonic metal, and the guitar.

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