Introducing Calibre CLI

CLI is a crucial part of a comprehensive system that helps to improve and automate monitoring performance.

Ben Schwarz
Calibre Blog
3 min readApr 17, 2018

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Here’s what the command line interface can do for you:

  • Retrieve performance metrics from Calibre, for integration with pre-existing custom reporting, dashboards or data warehousing.
  • Run a Calibre Snapshot following a deployment, then retrieve the metrics.
  • Add performance testing as part of your continuous integration suite.
  • And more!

📊 Seamless metrics export

Metrics are most useful when they’re easy to access. Getting stats out of Calibre is as trivial as a one-liner.

calibre site get-pulse-metrics fetches metrics from a given page, whereas calibre site get-snapshot-metrics --site=ryanair --snapshot=1628 will retreive metrics for a given point in time.

Adding a --json or --csv flag, returns machine readable data. Pushing data to a spreadsheet or dashboard software has never been so effortless.

get-pulse-metrics returns up to 30 days of metrics

🆕 One-off, shareable page tests

Getting fast feedback is important — that’s why we’ve created one-off page tests.

A screenshot of a one-off page test in terminal

One-off tests can be run from 14 test locations around the world, emulating connection speeds and devices, all with a single command.

Each one-off page test is stored in your team account forever.

Retrieving metrics for a pre-existing test is only a calibre test show <uuid> away.

A one-off test, formatted as JSON, colourised by jq.

Finally, we understand that not everyone is near a terminal window all day. Each test has a secret (but publicly sharable) URL, so you can share reports with the executive team, project managers and coworkers, even if they don’t have a Calibre account.

Because the test result pages are publicly accessible to anyone with a link, it’s possible to use them to showcase performance metrics and improvements in blog posts or case studies.

edition.cnn.com, tested by Calibre

🖥 Built with Node.js

Most of our customers build for the Web—they have familiarity with the Node.JS or JavaScript ecosystem, which is one of the reasons we chose to build CLI using Node.

By using CLI’s Node.js API, you’ll have all the power of Calibre at your fingertips. We created a couple of examples on Github to help you get started.

💡🏡 Google’s Lighthouse, built in

Every Calibre test runs Lighthouse, which provides a set of performance, best practice and accessibility audits, developed by the Google Chrome Devtools team. More power, less tooling.

🎬 Getting started with CLI

You’ll need a Calibre account to use CLI. There’s a free, 14-day trial, and we’re more than happy to help if there’s any questions along the way.

If you need any help with CLI, please reach out to us on support.
We can’t wait to see what you do with it!

🚀 Help us make the Web faster for everyone!

Calibre is a bootstrapped company. Every new customer allows us to continue growing and playing a part in making the Web a faster place for everyone.

Help us create more performance tooling and resources by sharing this article. ✨

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