kui-shell

Kui Shell

Kui Shell offers a new development experience for building cloud-native applications. By combining the power of familiar CLIs with visualizations in high-impact areas, Kui enables you to manipulate complex JSON and YAML data models, integrate disparate tooling, and provides quick access to aggregate views of operational data.

Quick Install

The fastest option is to install a prebuilt release.

Kui-MacOS.tar.bz2 | Kui-Linux.zip

Visit the Kui Installation Guide for installation details and alternative installation options.

Contributing

If you want to help, please take a look at our guidelines and developer guide.

The Kui Experience

Click the image to see Kui in motion. For more of the backstory of Kui, read on!

This is a CLI, with Visualizations on the Side

Kui uses Electron to provide you with an augmented but CLI-focused development experience. By using Electron, the same experience carries over, from local development on your laptop, to a browser-based experience.

When running locally, you will have access to your filesystem and your favorite terminal and text editor. To help with complex data, Kui offers a suite of visualizations. You can gracefully flip between the terminal and these visualizations, without having to switch to your browser, log in, wait for pages to load, and navigate through complex menu structures.

For example, to see a visual summary of your Kubernetes pods, issue this command from your favorite terminal:

Example Command	Thumbnail of Output
kubectl kui get pods --ui

Without the --ui option, Kui will display the output in your terminal directly; you will observe that the output is identical to that of kubectl, with the possible addition of syntax coloration. With Kui, you have the power to navigate between these modes in a graceful and flexible manner.

Now try clicking on a row. You should see the "sidecar" sweep in from the right. This split screen mode allows you to drill down to the details of your pods. You can click on one, then another, for rapid inspection of several of your resources. The animated gif should give you a sense of the possibilities (click on it to see a larger version).

Kui as a Tool Platform

Kui can form the basis for delivering CLI-driven GUI experiences. Here are a few such uses of Kui:

• Apache OpenWhisk visualizations: Oui

If you want to create your own client, with a custom theme, custom icons, and an enhanced set of commands, you can start here:

• Clone and own a boilerplate repo
• API documentation for authoring new commands
• Some older documentation; we will be consolidating this into the newer docs.