[reducks]

I've worked on building Confluent's CLI for the last 4 years, and after a year of technical work, security reviews, and sign-off meetings, I'm excited to share that the whole project (including all dependencies) is now open-source! https://github.com/confluentinc/cli

The CLI is optimized to work with Confluent's on-prem or cloud managed Kafka offerings, but the end goal is to have this be an amazing CLI experience for vanilla Apache Kafka as well. Regardless, there are some interesting bits in the repo (like doing SSO login from a Go terminal app, or mocking API servers for integration tests) that could be useful for other devs out there.

Happy to answer questions on Go, CLIs, Kafka, or how to convince big companies to open source their software. I'm really proud to share all the work with the community and to know that the code will be preserved. Cheers!

[jeffhollan]

Congrats @reducks! Looks like a slick CLI. I assume the CLI has been available prior to now, just behind closed source. Curious on what ended up being the deciding factor that helped bring it to full open source? Or maybe what had been holding the team back previously your team was able to overcome?

Love to see these types of developer tools in the open so great work!

[reducks]

Thanks! We've been shipping the CLI since early 2019 but had a few blockers along the way (alluded to in the blog post). We built the CLI on top of a lot of internal dependencies that were never going to be open-sourced, so we had to do a lot of creation and migration in order to have the CLI only rely on public dependencies (and in other cases, we went through the approval chain to release certain packages like `go-editor` and `go-ps1` into the open). Once we did that, once we cleaned up the codebase, and once we successfully pitched the business case for open-sourcing the tool, we were finally able to flip the switch. It's a small team so there was also always a prioritization question of working on open-sourcing vs. adding new features.

Excited for `snow` as well! ;)

[whizzter]

Obvious question in hindsight, was this related to the layoffs that just got announced?

[bsuvc]

Nice to see. Thank you for making it open source!