Stake Five

Sean put up his wishlist for CF recently, and one of the interesting things he was wishing for was the capability to call CF from the command line.

The thing is, you can already do this, and fairly easily. Let’s start by getting the right tool for the job - go pick up cURL, a tool for invoking URLs from the command line. Do note that if you choose to download the HTTPS-enabled version of cURL, you will need to also get the libeay.dll library for SSL support from OpenSSL.

That’s really all you need. You can invoke cURL like so: curl (CFM template URL). The output of the CFM is printed to the stdout, which means it will show up in your DOS window/UNIX shell/whatever. Easy, huh?

To invoke a CFC, you’ll have to use the CFC HTTP invocation syntax, which is simple enough:

http://(hostname):(port)/(context, if JEE deployment)/(path to CFC)?method=(function to invoke)&(argument list)

Responses from CFC functions are returned in WDDX format, unless the function returns XML, in which case the XML is returned as-is. Oh, and do make sure you tag your function with access=remote so that CF will allow remote calls to it.

For example, to invoke a function called echo, which takes an arguments input1 and input2, on a CFC my.application.callme, on a standalone CF deployment, you could do this:

http://myhost/my/application/callme.cfc?method=echo&input1=yodel&input2=hey

For those who think all this is just too hard (yeah, right!), here’s a simple shell script that will do the job of invoking a CFC - edit it to change your serverroot, then invoke it at will, passing in the CFC, function and argument list (in the form arg1=val1&arg2=val2).

serverroot="http://localhost:8500/"

callto=`echo $1 | sed -e 's/\\./\\//g'`
cffunction=$2
args=$3

url=$serverroot$callto".cfc?method="$cffunction"&"$args

curl $url

For example, if your save your script as callCF.sh:

callCF.sh my.application.callme echo input1=yodel&input2=hey

Apologies to DOS users - the scripting that I have done, I’ve done on UNIX systems. Even when I’m forced to use Windows on the desktop, I always have Cygwin installed so I have all those great UNIX command line tools handy.

Now I hear you thinking - do we really have to have a server running to make all these invocations? Couldn’t we have a nice lightweight runtime that can be invoked on the fly? In theory, yes, of course we could. In practice, absolutely not - CFMX was built on the assumption that it would run within a JEE application server. Ripping out, and rebuilding, all the plumbing would be a prohibitively expensive task.

Well, there’s at least one wish fulfilled that we can all talk about - if only the others were as easy! I cannot, alas, yet tell you how many more of Sean’s, and others’, wishes will be granted for Scorpio… But rest assured, we’re paying attention. And some of those wishes, well, they’ve already been granted.

Update: Dopefly opines, as Sean does, that a gateway would provide for more secure invocation. I don’t entirely agree with them - this really comes down to where you choose to put your security, in a gateway, or in a CFC. It could easily be embedded in a CFC by checking that the CGI.SERVER_NAME is localhost, or by ensuring that the IP address of the caller, CGI.REMOTE_ADDR, is in a whitelist of IP addresses allowed to invoke the CFC.