The Command Line Interface (in short CLI) is an interface for configuring AXIGEN remotely. In order to do that, a socket will listen on a specified address for connections, thus the commands can be issued using common tools such as Telnet, Netcat, etc.

Service Description

CLI is for AXIGEN another service, more precisely a TCP service, just like SMTP, IMAP, POP3, etc. The CLI service can be configured in its turn similarly to the other services, either by editing the configuration files or by using the remote configuration tools like CLI and WebAdmin. It has common parameters such as maxErrors, logLevel, etc. and also a list of listeners for configuring incoming connections.

The connection to the service must be authenticated using the default ‘admin’ username and the password previously set for it. For more details on how to set the admin password using the AXIGEN Configuration Wizard see this section. For details on how to set the admin password manually, please read this section. See Connecting to CLI for a detailed login procedure.

CLI is structured in contexts, each of them including a specific set of commands. CLI also uses a common set of commands. Each context provides commands allowing switching to the previous and next context and a HELP command to view the available commands at that specific location. When connected, the login context is activated and an username and password must be provided; after activation, the initial context becomes active. The initial context is the only one not having a name in the command prompt.

Commands are not case sensitive, meaning that you can enter HELP, help, Help, HeLP, it will still mean HELP. Also, when you need to assign values to parameters of certain commands, these values can be entered in 3 ways:

1. escaped
2. quoted
3. double quoted.

This is useful when entering regular expressions and spaces and is very similar to the way the strings are entered in unix bash.

1. escaped string: in this form, the string cannot contain not printable characters, and the characters that must be escaped with a backslash are: spaces, quotes and double-quotes.
2. quoted string: (e.g.: 'something') in this form, the string will preserve the literal value of each character within the quotes. A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash
3. double quoted string: (e.g. "something"): in this form, the string will behave just like in the escaped form, ignoring the backslash before any character. The difference is that all the characters, including non-printables, are accepted and that the spaces and single quotes need not be escaped.
   

In the escaped and double-quoted form, the backslash character must be escaped in order to have a backslash as a result.

The CLI parent / child contexts follow the structure of the configuration file where some objects are children of other parent objects. In general, a context that uses COMMIT for saving changes is considered a parent and a context that uses DONE for saving changes is considered a child.

Contexts are, with a few exceptions, associated with configuration objects that appear in the config file.

The notion of key parameter-value pair is related to the primary key concept. It uniquely identifies an object in a list of objects. The key value cannot be changed if the context was created using an ADD command.

The configuration contexts corresponding config objects (like server, all services, etc.) update only when entering and leaving the respective context and when one of the reset commands is issued. Thus, if anything is changed using another version of CLI or WEBADMIN, the change will be present only when leaving and entering the context again or after a reset command is issued.

When leaving the context using COMMIT and the commit fails, update of the context is NOT performed. This happens because any modifications made before commit would be lost. As a result, invalid settings may appear to exist in config.
If you want to reset the configuration for that context, issue a CANCEL or a RESET command.

Any changes made to a TCP service like: CLI, WEBMAIL, WEBADMIN, etc. affect only new connections to that service and not the active ones.

The subsections of this chapter contain the following:

• Special Contexts - the most important contexts in CLI are explained
• Common commands - commands used in all AXIGEN contexts
• Context Specific Commands - a list of all contexts and commands available in CLI you can use for reference to see all the different operations you can perform using CLI

Important! Within all CLI contexts and commands, the term "Script Filters" refers to Message rules, "Socket Filters" refers to Antivirus/Antispam Filters, while "SMTP Filters" generically defines Message Acceptace, Processing and Realy Policies.

See subsections of current page for more details:

Connecting to CLI
Troubleshoot the CLI Connection
Common commands
Context Specific Commands (I)
Context Specific Commands (II)
Special Contexts