A Short Tour of the Noms CLI

This is a quick introduction to the Noms command-line interface. It should only take a few minutes to read, but there's also a screencast if you prefer:

Install Noms

... if you haven't already. Follow the instructions here.

Now you should be able to run noms:

> noms

usage: noms [-no-pager] [command] [command-args]

Available commands:

  ds
  log
  show
  sync
  ui

See noms <command> -h for information on each available command.

The `noms` command

Without any arguments, noms lists out all available commands. To get information on a specific command, we can suffix it with -h:

> noms sync -h
Moves datasets between or within databases.

noms sync [options] <source-object> <dest-dataset>

...

noms ds

There's a sample database running at http://demo.noms.io/cli-tour. Let's take a look inside...

The noms ds command lists the datasets within a particular database:

> noms ds http://demo.noms.io/cli-tour

registered-businesses
film-locations
fire-incidents
fire-permits

noms log

Noms datasets are versioned. You can see the history with log:

> noms log http://demo.noms.io/cli-tour:film-locations

sha1-20e6020b3f0b2728935e23f0e4c2d942e26b7ae1
Parent: sha1-b50c323c568bfff07a13fe276236cbdf40b5d846
List<struct Row {
  ActorQ201: String
  ActorQ202: String
  ActorQ203: String
  Director: String
  Distributor: String
  FunQ20Facts: String
  Locations: String
...

sha1-b50c323c568bfff07a13fe276236cbdf40b5d846
Parent: sha1-4883ff49f930718f7aafede265b51f83c99cf7bc
List<struct Row {
  ActorQ201: String
  ActorQ202: String
  ActorQ203: String
  Director: String
  Distributor: String
  FunQ20Facts: String
  Locations: String
...

Note that Noms is a typed system. What is being shown here is not text, but the first bit of a serialization of the structured data that Noms actually stores.

noms show

You can see the entire serialization of any object in the database with noms show:

> noms show http://demo.noms.io/cli-tour:sha1-20e6020b3f0b2728935e23f0e4c2d942e26b7ae1

struct Commit {
  parents: Set<Ref<Cycle<0>>>
  value: Value
}({
  parents: {
    sha1-b50c323c568bfff07a13fe276236cbdf40b5d846,
  },
  value: [
    Row {
      ActorQ201: "Siddarth",
      ActorQ202: "Nithya Menon",
      ActorQ203: "Priya Anand",
      Director: "Jayendra",
      Distributor: "",
      FunQ20Facts: "",
      Locations: "Epic Roasthouse (399 Embarcadero)",
      ProductionQ20Company: "SPI Cinemas",
      ReleaseQ20Year: "2011",
      SmileQ20AgainQ2CQ20JennyQ20Lee: "",
      Title: "180",
      Writer: "Umarji Anuradha, Jayendra, Aarthi Sriram, & Suba ",
    },

noms sync

You can work with Noms databases that are remote exactly the same as you work with local databases. But it's frequently useful to move data to a local machine, for example, to make a private fork or to work with the data disconnected from the source database.

Moving data in Noms is done with the sync command. Note that unlike Git, we do not make a distinction between push and pull. It's the same operation in both directions:

> noms sync http://demo.noms.io/cli-tour:film-locations ldb:/tmp/noms:films
> noms ds ldb:/tmp/noms
films

We can now make an edit locally:

> cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/attic-labs/noms/samples/go/csv
> go install ./...
> csv-export ldb:/tmp/noms:films /tmp/film-locations.csv

open /tmp/film-location.csv and edit it, then:

> csv-import /tmp/film-location.csv ldb:/tmp/noms:films

#noms diff

The noms diff command can show you the differences between any two values. Let's see our change:

> noms diff ldb:/tmp/noms:films http://demo.noms.io/cli-tour:film-locations

3.8 KiB Raw Blame History