google-nomulus/docs/registry-tool.md

Registry tool

The registry tool is a command-line registry administration tool that is invoked using the registry_tool command. It has the ability to view and change a large number of things in a running domain registry environment, including creating registrars, updating premium and reserved lists, running an EPP command from a given XML file, and performing various backend tasks like re-running RDE if the most recent export failed. Its code lives inside the tools package (java/google/registry/tools), and is compiled by building the registry_tool target in the Bazel BUILD file in that package.

To build the tool and display its command-line help, execute this command:

$ bazel run //java/google/registry/tool:registry_tool -- --help

For future invocations you should alias the compiled binary in the bazel-genfiles/java/google/registry directory or add it to your path so that you can run it more easily. The rest of this guide assumes that it has been aliased to registry_tool.

The registry tool is always called with a specific environment to run in using the -e parameter. This looks like:

$ registry_tool -e production {command name} {command parameters}

To see a list of all available commands along with usage information, run registry_tool without specifying a command name, e.g.:

$ registry_tool -e alpha

Note that the documentation for the commands comes from JCommander, which parses metadata contained within the code to yield documentation.

Tech support commands

There are actually two separate tools, gtech_tool, which is a collection of lower impact commands intended to be used by tech support personnel, and registry_tool, which is a superset of gtech_tool that contains additional commands that are potentially more destructive and can change more aspects of the system. A full list of gtech_tool commands can be found in GtechTool.java, and the additional commands that only registry_tool has access to are in RegistryTool.java.

Local and server-side commands

There are two broad ways that commands are implemented: some that send requests to ToolsServlet to execute the action on the server (these commands implement ServerSideCommand), and others that execute the command locally using the Remote API (these commands implement RemoteApiCommand). Server-side commands take more work to implement because they require both a client and a server-side component, e.g. CreatePremiumListCommand.java and CreatePremiumListAction.java respectively for creating a premium list. However, they are fully capable of doing anything that is possible with App Engine, including running a large MapReduce, because they execute on the tools service in the App Engine cloud.

Local commands, by contrast, are easier to implement, because there is only a local component to write, but they aren't as powerful. A general rule of thumb for making this determination is to use a local command if possible, or a server-side command otherwise.

Common tool patterns

All tools ultimately implement the Command interface located in the tools package. If you use an IDE such as Eclipse to view the type hierarchy of that interface, you'll see all of the commands that exist, as well as how a lot of them are grouped using sub-interfaces or abstract classes that provide additional functionality. The most common patterns that are used by a large number of other tools are:

• BigqueryCommand -- Provides a connection to BigQuery for tools that need it.
• ConfirmingCommand -- Provides the methods prompt() and execute() to override. prompt() outputs a message (usually what the command is going to do) and prompts the user to confirm execution of the command, and then execute() actually does it.
• EppToolCommand -- Commands that work by executing EPP commands against the server, usually by filling in a template with parameters that were passed on the command-line.
• MutatingEppToolCommand -- A sub-class of EppToolCommand that provides a --dry_run flag, that, if passed, will display the output from the server of what the command would've done without actually committing those changes.
• GetEppResourceCommand -- Gets individual EPP resources from the server and outputs them.
• ListObjectsCommand -- Lists all objects of a specific type from the server and outputs them.
• MutatingCommand -- Provides a facility to create or update entities in Datastore, and uses a diff algorithm to display the changes that will be made before committing them.