Today we're excited to announce that we've open sourced oclif, a framework for building command line interfaces.

We built oclif to serve as the common foundation for both the Heroku and Salesforce CLIs and to abstract away the common struggles. The framework is now available to any developer for building CLIs large or small. oclif makes building CLIs more accessible by providing you with the patterns and tools to scaffold a working command line interface. It provides a structure for simple to advanced CLIs, including documentation, testing, and plugins for adding new commands.

With oclif you can get up and running with your command line interface quickly, and focus on the...

Over the past decade, millions of developers have interacted with the Heroku CLI. In those 10 years, the CLI has gone through many changes. We've changed languages several times; redesigned the plugin architecture; and improved test coverage and the test framework. What follows is the story of our team's journey to build and maintain the Heroku CLI from the early days of Heroku to today.

1. Ruby (CLI v1-v3)
2. Go/Node (CLI v4)
3. Go/Node (CLI v5)
4. Pure Node (CLI v6)
5. What's Next?

Ruby (CLI v1-v3)

Our original CLI (v1-v3) was written in Ruby and served us well for many years. Ruby is a great, expressive language for building CLIs, however, we started experiencing enough problems that...

Today we are announcing the newest version of the Heroku CLI. We know how much time you spend in the CLI as developers and how much pride you take in being able to get things done quickly. Our new CLI has big improvements in performance as well as enhanced readability for humans and machines.

Tuned for Performance

CLI response time is made up of two parts: the API response time and the performance of the CLI itself, and the latter is where we’ve made big improvements. While a typical Unix user should experience responses that are around half a second faster, the biggest gains are for Windows users, as the new CLI no longer has a Ruby wrapper.

When we measured the time it takes for the...