# TCLI: Overview
---
## Description
The **TIBCO Command Line Interface (TCLI)** is a tool that can be run from the command line to **manage** your **Cloud Applications** and interact with the **TIBCO Cloud**. The tool can be used on Windows, Linux or a MAC. By entering commands on a terminal you work **interactively** (Questions & Answers) or **directly** by providing the answers inline or from a (property) file. It serves the following use cases:
* Manage your developer environment of a Cloud Application.
* Interact and Manage your Cloud Application on the TIBCO Cloud.
* Support certain operations in your TIBCO Cloud Organization.
* Execute repeatable deployment, management, monitoring and testing tasks.
* Integrate with a Continuous Integration Build pipeline
---
## Prerequisites
The TCLI works based on Node.js, which can be downloaded from here.
You can check your node installation by running one of the following commands:
```console
node -v
npm -v
```
Since a TIBCO Cloud Application is an Angular Application, you will need the Angular CLI. After you have installed Node.js, you can install the Angular CLI with the following command:
```console
npm install -g @angular/cli
```
---
## Installation
Use the following command to install the TCLI:
```console
npm install -g @tibco-tcstk/cloud-cli
```
You can validate your installation by running:
```console
tcli -v
```
This should print the version of the TCLI that you are using.
---
## Help
When running the TCLI you can always request help by running the following command:
```console
tcli help
```
Or get help on a specific task, by running:
```console
tcli help
```
This can also be shorted with -h, for example:
```console
tcli -h show-cloud
```
---
## Getting Started
The best is to create a new empty folder on your machine and go there with a terminal. But you can run from any folder if you like. When you start the TCLI by just running:
```console
tcli
```
Without any additional options the command line tool will look for a file called 'tibco-cloud.properties'. If this file is not found you get 4 options:
To get started just choose to create a new property file. The tcli will ask you for your Client ID and login details to the TIBCO Cloud to create an OAUTH Token. Get your client ID from https://cloud.tibco.com/ -> Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Display Client ID. If you have a global configuration already setup the tcli will use that configuration for the connection details. Read more about Global Configuration here: [Global Configuration](../concepts/002_Global_Configuration.md#zoom)
> ***Note:*** You can also run to use or create a tibco cloud property file with a different name:
```console
tcli -p
```
A property file is generated, which contains information for the tcli to do it's work:
After the property file is generated you will get into an interactive menu with a list of tasks:
All subsequent times you run tcli in this folder you will get into this menu. From here you can choose any of the tasks to run. You can ***start typing*** in this menu to ***search within the available tasks*** and their descriptions. But you can also use the ***up and down arrows*** to scroll through them. Press enter to run a task, for example the first one show-cloud. Running this task also validates that the tcli can actually connect with the TIBCO Cloud and shows the connected organization. The results looks somewhat like this:
> Note: After running a task you can always press up and run **repeat-last-task** to re-run the task you just run. This is very handy, to quickly repeat a task.
You can also run a task directly without getting into the interactive menu, by running:
```console
tcli
```
> ***Note:*** You can make this direct task completely verbose (non-interactive) by providing answers inline. [Click here for more information about providing answers](../concepts/006_Passing_In_Answers.md#zoom)
> For example:
```console
tcli show-cloud-app-links
```
Certain tasks also have an ***alternative short name***, for example
```console
tcli sl
```
You can find these Alternatives in the help description of a task:
```console
tcli -h show-cloud-app-links
```
Now you are ready to [setup your own Cloud Application](../tutorials/003_Get_Started.md#zoom)