The hobo CLI
The CLI is deliberately small — a hobo carries one stick, not a toolbox. up and down are the only lifecycle verbs: ship, promote, roll back, migrate, and even self-host bootstrap are flags on the same convergence loop, not separate commands. Every documented example on this site sticks to this canonical surface.
Lifecycle
hobo up
hobo up --camp prod
hobo up --camp prod --to <revision>
hobo up --rollback
hobo up ./platform --seed
hobo down --camp pr-123up realizes the current object graph: build, plan, gate, provision, deploy. down tears it back in reverse dependency order. up always reruns the applicable gate before mutation — a stale preflight can never authorize a deploy. Continuous migrations run this same loop; there is no separate migrate verb.
The full verb surface
| Verb | Role | Semantics |
|---|---|---|
up / down | lifecycle | Realize / tear down the object graph. |
dev | local loop | Offline local-runtime camp; serve api/web handlers in-process. |
new | local loop | Scaffold a runnable SDK program. |
login / claim | identity | Dev identity (OIDC/SVID path); bind an anonymous deployment to an account. |
connection | identity | Durable Connections (create / authorize / list / get / revoke / rotate). |
identity | identity | Continuous identity migration status / inspect (zero Bindle config). |
access | identity | Elevated / cross-env access or break-glass (short-lived, audited). |
feature | delivery | OpenFeature flags / canary / experiment (list | eval | set | kill …). |
deploy | delivery | Attested continuous-delivery status / logs / rollback (not a second lifecycle). |
incident | delivery | CD failure disposition: A2H handoff or sandboxed self-heal. |
plan | read-only | Dry-run the up decision: plan, matching, cost, warnings. |
verify | read-only | Unified Gatekeeper preflight. |
can-deploy | read-only | Producer/consumer compatibility matrix. |
inspect | read-only | Projections and time-travel views (run, deploy, topology, …). |
logs | read-only | Live-tail Camp streams. |
doctor | diagnostics | Environment, credential, connectivity, and portability hazards. |
messaging | diagnostics | Messaging capability + delivery-guarantee readiness. |
codegen / build / collect / stub | authoring | Bindings, wasm components, manifest IR, contract-backed stubs. |
drift | diagnostics | Drift report + governed remediation paths. |
add / registry | distribution | Install providers after sig/provenance/conformance; registry admin. |
import | migration | Adopt an existing estate in place — never destroy/recreate on import. |
generate | generation | Request the provider-generation loop for a missing backend. |
sandbox / test | test loop | Isolated lanes; out-of-scope boundaries served from contracts. |
attest / erase | governance | Signed evidence exports; crypto-shred with projection rebuild. |
broker | governance | Conductor resolve / config / matrix (placement plane). |
yard | control plane | Install and inspect the default bare-metal Yard. |
station | control plane | Station ops/setup (init | up | down | status | rails *) — not lifecycle. |
serve | control plane | Local control-plane HTTP+SSE for the Yard game UI. |
replay | observability | Session Replay list/get/open/summarize/retention/doctor. |
derivative | extensibility | Manage derived HoBo implementations. |
runbook | SRE | Execute or replay incident runbooks under policy. |
Not lifecycle (and not missing)
Where other tools invent ceremony commands, HoBo folds them into the model:
- Lifecycle shipping is only
up/down(plus flags). A separate “deploy command” as lifecycle is rejected. deployas a verb still exists — it is the continuous-delivery observe surface (status/logs/rollback), not a second ship path.destroy,teardown,rollback, andpromoteas standalone commands are rejected; usedownorup --rollback/ promotion via convergence.train,crew, andfleetare SDK code and projections, not CLI verbs.
Status
The canonical verb set is on the composed hobo surface today and maps 1:1 to hobo-mcp tools (parity is contract-tested). Lifecycle is up / down; hobo deploy is observe-only delivery status, not the ship verb. Interactive authoring is hobo-code. The default path is the local lane: offline Yard runtime, durable SQLite journal, no cloud account. Live deploy lanes are credential-gated (Cloudflare, Vercel, or live IaC credentials). Some advanced flags (--to, --rollback, --seed) and deeper multi-cloud depth are still maturing — see the trail map. Global flags that work everywhere: --json, --camp, --cwd, --verbose, -q, --help.