Management commands

Marten comes with a built-in command line interface (CLI) that developers can leverage to perform common actions and interact with the framework. This tool provides a set of built-in sub-commands that can be easily extended with new commands.

Usage

The marten command is available with each Marten installation, and it is also automatically compiled when the Marten shard is installed. This means that you can either use the marten command from anywhere in your system (if the Marten CLI was installed globally like described in Installation) or you can run the relative bin/marten command from inside your project structure.

When the marten command is executed, it will look for a relative manage.cr file to identify your current project, its settings, and its installed applications, which in turn will define the available sub-commands that you can run.

The marten command is intended to be used as follows:

marten [command] [options] [arguments]

As you can see, the marten CLI must be used with a specific command, possibly followed by options and arguments (which may be required or not depending on the considered command). All the built-in commands are listed in the management commands reference.

Displaying help information

You can display help information about a specific management command by using the marten CLI as follows:

marten help [command]
marten [command] --help

Listing commands

It is possible to list all the available commands within a project by running the marten CLI as follows:

marten help

This should output something like this:

Usage: marten [command] [options] [arguments]

Available commands:

[marten]

  › clearsessions    Clear all expired sessions.
  › collectassets    Collect all the assets and copy them in a unique storage.
  › gen / g          Generate various structures, abstractions, and values within an existing project.
  › genmigrations    Generate new database migrations.
  › listmigrations   List all database migrations.
  › migrate          Run database migrations.
  › new              Initialize a new Marten project or application repository.
  › play             Start a Crystal playground server initialized for the current project.
  › resetmigrations  Reset an existing set of migrations into a single one.
  › routes           Display all the routes of the application.
  › serve / s        Start a development server that is automatically recompiled when source files change.
  › version          Show the Marten version.

Run a command followed by --help to see command specific information, ex:
marten [command] --help

All the available commands are listed per application: by default, only marten commands are listed obviously (if no other applications are installed), but it should be noted that applications can contribute management commands as well. If that's the case, these additional commands will be automatically listed as well.

Shared options

Each command can accept its own set of arguments and options, but it should be noted that all the available commands always accept the following options:

• --error-trace - Allows showing the full error trace (if a compilation is involved)
• --no-color - Disables colored outputs
• -h, --help - Displays help information about the considered command

Available commands

Please head over to the management commands reference to see a list of all the available management commands. Implementing custom management commands is also a possibility that is documented in Create custom commands.