The Cloud Foundry CLI is the official command line client for Cloud Foundry, written in Go and designed to enable developers and operators to interact with Cloud Foundry platforms from the terminal. The repository serves as the primary tool for managing applications, services, and infrastructure within Cloud Foundry environments, supporting deployment automation, application management, and platform-as-a-service operations across multi-cloud deployments.
The CLI currently maintains v8 as its actively supported version, which is backed by the v3 Cloud Controller API. Version 7 and version 6 are no longer maintained or released, though the repository provides installation guides and documentation for both current and deprecated versions. Users can access comprehensive help documentation through the cf help command or view online resources for v8 and v7 CLI versions. The repository includes installation instructions, version switching guides, and detailed documentation for transitioning between different CLI versions.
The project maintains an extensive list of known issues and platform-specific workarounds documented in the README. These include Windows-specific challenges with interactive password prompts in Cygwin and Git Bash, SSH display issues when TERM is not properly configured, and hanging behavior in MINGW shells. The repository also documents requirements for custom and self-signed certificates, API tracing limitations with certain plugin commands, UTF-8 encoding requirements for .cfignore files, and architecture-specific binary compatibility issues on Linux systems.
GitGenius activity data reveals significant ongoing development and maintenance. The median issue and pull request response latency across 256 tracked items is approximately 26,624 hours, with a mean latency of 26,024.5 hours, indicating substantial backlogs in issue processing. The most active issue label is unscheduled with 150 tracked items, followed by enhancement requests with 34 items and v7-related issues with 15 items. The primary contributors tracked by GitGenius are gururajsh with 380 events, a-b with 337 events, and joaopapereira with 28 events, demonstrating concentrated maintainer activity.
The CLI supports plugin development through an external code execution API, allowing developers to extend functionality with community-contributed plugins available through the official plugins repository. The plugin development guide and examples are included in the main repository, with plugins importing from code.cloudfoundry.org/cli/v9/plugin, while older plugins using the legacy github.com/cloudfoundry/cli/plugin path remain compatible through vendoring.
The repository is connected to other major open source projects through overlapping contributors, with GitGenius identifying links to microsoft/vscode, microsoft/typescript, and rust-lang/rust. The project welcomes community contributions through its contributors guide and accepts translation updates through its i18n framework. Support is available through the Cloud Foundry Slack community and the cf-dev mailing list for users with questions or issues.
