Nosto CLI Tool

A command-line interface to interact with Nosto's backend systems. Primarily aimed at developers and power-users who aim to use more powerful desktop tools for search-template development and (in the future) other features.

About Nosto

If you are unfamiliar with Nosto as a company, you are welcome to visit our homepage at https://www.nosto.com.

If you wish to know more about our tech stack, we publish extensive documentation known as the Techdocs.

Usage

Nosto CLI aims to be as user-friendly as CLI tools get. You should be able to get up and running by utilizing the built-in help and setup commands, but a quick-start guide is also provided here.

To start with, you may create an empty folder for your project; or you may clone your git repository to work with.

# Install the CLI tool:
npm i @nosto/nosto-cli -g

# Login to Nosto
# You will see the browser window open with further instructions.
nosto login

# Run the tool targeting a project directory:
nosto status /path/to/project

# Alternatively, `cd` into the project directory and omit the path
cd /path/to/project && nosto status

Configuration

The recommended way to provide the configuration is a configuration file in the project folder, named .nosto.json. Alternatively, environmental variables can be used. If both are present, the environment takes precedence.

See output of nosto setup for the full list of options.

You should never push the content of your .nosto.json to your git repository as it may contain sensitive data.

Required configuration

At the minimum, one option is required: Merchant ID. If you're targeting an environment other than production, an API URL will also be required.

To quickly create a minimal configuration file, you may use the following command: NOSTO_MERCHANT=merchant-id nosto setup

Merchant ID:

Public ID of the target merchant.

Property name in the config file: merchant Property name in the env variable: NOSTO_MERCHANT

API URL (Optional):

By default, the CLI will try to contact production as the base URL. You may need to specify a different URL to target the correct environment.

• Production URL: https://api.nosto.com
• Staging URL: https://api.staging.nosto.com
• Nosto internal development URL: https://my.dev.nos.to/api

Property name in the config file: apiUrl Property name in the env variable: NOSTO_API_URL

API Key (Optional):

By default, the CLI will use your user credentials created by nosto login. If the API token is provided for a given project, it will be used instead.

Your access key for the target merchant. Specifically, a private Nosto API_APPS token that you can find in the merchant admin settings.

Property name in the config file: apiKey Property name in the env variable: NOSTO_API_KEY

Excluded files

Nosto CLI takes the contents of your .gitignore file into account when pushing files to the remote, skipping all files matching these patterns. In addition, the CLI implicitly ignores any files or folders that start with .. I.e. .nosto.json is excluded automatically.

During the pull, CLI downloads all files from the remote.

The /build folder is an exception to the rules above. It will never be skipped during pushing, even if added to .gitignore, and it is always ignored while pulling.

Recommended .gitignore

build
.nosto.json
.nostocache

Supported commands

You can use nosto help and variations to obtain detailed and up-to-date information on the current list of commands.

• login
  • Opens the browser window to start the login flow.
  • Stores the credentials (email and temporary access token) in ~/.nosto/.auth.json
• logout
  • Wipes the stored login credentials
• setup [projectPath]
  • Prints setup information and creates a placeholder config file if needed
• status [projectPath]
  • Reads the configuration and prints the general status
• st [projectPath]
  • Alias: search-templates [projectPath]
  • Search templates related commands
  • st pull [projectPath]
    • Fetches the current remote state for the configured merchant
  • st push [projectPath]
    • Pushes the local state to the remote for the configured merchant
  • st build [projectPath]
    • For a modern search-template project, it invokes the onBuild script in nosto.config.ts
    • For a legacy search-template project, it mirrors the hosted VSCode Web build workflow
  • st dev [projectPath]
    • Watches files, build and upload automatically
    • For a modern search-template project, it invokes the onBuildWatch script in nosto.config.ts
    • For a legacy search-template project, it uses esbuild to watch files, build and upload automatically. Only uploads build artifacts, not the sources.

External dependencies in legacy search-templates

With the addition of local builds, the external dependencies are something that is theoretically possible. However, due to complexities of the legacy setup, external deps will not be officially supported in the legacy templates. We understand that this is something modern web development needs, and we are addressing that by our upcoming open source search-templates offering. Specifically, search-templates-starter, search-js and this very CLI tool.

If you would still like to try your luck with introducing dependencies into a legacy app, we recommend you stick with only build-time dependencies like TypeScript that disappear at runtime. In that case, build your app as you would, and point the CLI's build to the output folder.

Development

Testing

This project uses Vitest as the test runner. Tests are organized under the test/ directory mirroring the structure of src/.

Available scripts

# Run tests once
npm run test

# Run tests in watch mode
npm run test:watch

# Run tests with UI
npm run test:ui

# Run tests with coverage report
npm run test:coverage

Known issues

Search templates push reports no files changed

Running nosto st push after nosto st dev without changing any files will stop early with the "No files to push" message due to the hashing mechanism not taking the pushed paths into account properly.

Workaround: Use nosto st push -f or change any of the files to update the hash.

Contributions

We welcome both internal and external contributions to this project! Feel free to request bugfixes, open issues or PRs for review. Nosto is actively maintaining this project, and we will process your contributions as soon as possible.