github.com/ecadlabs/tezos-cli

An experimental tezos command line interface

This is an experimental project.

The tez program is a command line interface (CLI) for interacting with the Tezos blockchain.

Goals (not necessarily implemented yet!)

• Easy to install on any popular operating system (binaries for all OS, packages for many (rpm, deb, snaps) and docker images)
• A joy to use, makes use of the "sub-command" cli pattern that we have become familiar with (similar to git & docker)
• Ships with command completions for bash, zsh and powershell
• Easily create and manage tezos "contexts" allowing the user to store settings for mainnet, alphanet and privatenets (for testing/dev)
• Easy to script with (Outputs human friendly data by default, or json with -o json)
• Support transactions such as
  • Managing delegations
  • Transferring tokens
  • Voting
  • Deploying smart contracts
• Support for remote signers, and consumer HSM's (ledger)
• Well tested with a complete suite of text fixtures

But there's already an official tezos-client

Yes, and tezos-client is great! But it has some downsides, and diversity is a strength.

The Tezos blockchain ships with tezos-client, a complete tezos cli. It is written in OCaml (which we ❤️), it is well tested and complete.

tezos-client has some downsides, in that it is not terribly easy to package. Building standalone static binaries is probably possible, but doesn't appear trivial. tezos-client is relatively tightly coupled to the core tezos node.

For new-comers to Tezos, we think interacting with the Tezos Block chain from the command line interface has too much friction.

tezos-client has opinions and idiosyncrasies. Frankly, we have come to like them, but newcomers to Tezos may not have the same patience as us.

We also may end up having alternative implementations of the Tezos Node in other languages (hello simplestaking team!). Think of these as Linux distributions to GNU/Linux, but Tezos node distributions for the Tezos Blockchain. When new nodes come along, this tez cli could support them and the RPCs/APIs that they implement.

Try out the alpha release

Visit the Releases page and download a pre-built binary for your operating system. We build for Windows, MaxOSX, Linux and FreeBSD. If you want builds for another OS or architecture, open an issue!

The feature set is limited to querying blocks. We will build out new features as time permits.