One exciting feature about CommandBox is the ability to group commands together into a lovingly little file we call, a recipe.  We even gave it its own extension, .boxr.  This little gem will allow you to automate several commands from your native shell, it will be faster to use our recipe command that allows you to run several CommandBox commands at once. This will allow you to only load the CommandBox engine once for all those commands, but still be dumped back at your native prompt when done. Recipes can also just be useful for a series of commands you run on a regular basis, from test executions, to compressing files, the possibilities are endless.  

How to start?

Recipes are modern batch files or shell scripts for those unix fans.It has the capability to execute commands just like if you are in the shell, have comments and even have the ability to do argument binding. Technically a recipe can have any file extension, but the default recommendation is .boxr which stands for "box recipe". Lines that start with a # will be ignored as comments. just like in many batch files.  Here is a nice example:

# Named param
echo "Hello $name, we are ready to start your recipe"
# Positional param
echo "Hello $1, we are ready to start your recipe"


# Start with an empty folder
rm mySite --recurse --force
mkdir mySite
cd mySite

# Initialize this folder as a package
init name=mySite version=1.0.0 slug=mySlug

# Scaffold out a site and a handler
coldbox create app mySite
coldbox create handler myHandler index

# Add some required package
install coldbox
install cbmessagebox,cbstorages,cbvaidation

# Set the default port
package set defaultPort=8081

# Start up the embedded server
start

Executing Your Recipe

You will use the recipe command in order to execute recipes.  You can find much more information about the recipe command by typing recipe help or visiting the API Docs.

recipe myrecipe.boxr

If you have named parameters you would execute it like this:

recipe recipeFile=myrecipe.boxr name=Luis

If you have positional parameters you would execute it like this:

recipe myrecipe.boxr Luis

As you can see, very nicely you can bind your recipes with dynamic content and automate pretty much anything.  We even have a contribution type in ForgeBox for all CommandBox recipes, so please share them with the world.