TAP 1.6 – Tanzu CLI Improvements

Across the Tanzu portfolio as a whole, their has been a major effort for a long time to build a truly cohesive and user friendly experience for operators and developers. Since the early days of TKG, and since the beginning of TAP, the Tanzu CLI has been a key element of how users interact with the platform. While TKG, TAP and recently TMC as well, all were using Tanzu CLI as the base CLI for their products, each product had its own releases of the CLI, which were often incompatible with one another, and the distribution of the CLI was not simple, as it had to be downloaded from Tanzu Network, and no automated installation, or package manager support existed. VMware understood this challenge, and did a complete rearchitecture of the CLI in terms of package and plugin management, as well as distribution of the CLI, and now in TAP 1.6 we are seeing the fruit of this long awaited new Tanzu CLI! With TAP 1.6 and on, Tanzu CLI is now a separately released product / tool, which is not only available on Tanzu Network, but also as a github release artifact, as well as it being made available in all main package managers such as brew, apt, yum, and choco. The Tanzu CLI now also offers an easy way to download and upgrade the product specific plugins via the new concept of plugin groups. To show how great this new UX is, lets take an example of a windows user, that has choco package manager setup on their machine, and needs to use Tanzu CLI for TKG 2.2, TMC and TAP 1.6: choco install tanzu-cli tanzu plugin install --group vmware-tkg/default:v2.2.0 tanzu plugin install --group vmware-tmc/tmc-user tanzu plugin install --group vmware-tap/default:v1.6.1 This experience is truly a game changer, and makes enablement and getting users onboarded to TAP in particular as well as all of the Tanzu products, so much easier, and a much more polished UX. The new CLI model also makes airgapped support easy with the ability to relocate the plugins to an airgapped OCI registry via a simple download command and then one more simple upload command: tanzu plugin download-bundle --to-tar /tmp/plugin_bundle_complete.tar.gz tanzu plugin upload-bundle --tar /tmp/plugin_bundle_complete.tar.gz --to-repo `registry.example.com/tanzu-cli/plugin` Once images are relocated, all an end user needs to do to get the plugins, is to run one more command before installing the plugins as usual which is to set the URI for the internally hosted plugins: tanzu plugin source update default --uri registry.example.com/tanzu-cli/plugin/plugin-inventory:latest As you can see, this is a huge improvement over previous releases, and will make the overall getting started experience so much smoother! Summary It is really great to see the whole Tanzu picture coming together, and having the unified CLI experience, will hopefully be just the first step in the direction of truly making the better together story a reality!