AppFog Cloud PaaS CLI : Getting Started Guide

AppFog Cloud PaaS is quite popular both for free quota to host websites and applications as well as the flexible platform they delivers at an affordable price. AppFog is a multi IaaS enabled platform as a service. That gives AppFog more flexibility than Heroku Cloud or OpenShift. The biggest advantage of Heroku definitely the free SSL. However, SSL is not required by all. With a website running WordPress with ~ 300 visitors per day will run quite fine for free on AppFog Cloud PaaS. Previous guide on AppFog was on installing WordPress through GUI. This is an introductory article on the command line interface of AppFog. This is a text based guide, we will later publish video tutorials on AppFog. For some, AppFog can be a better alternative to Rackspace Cloud Server (unmanaged) for reduction of cost, though it is a PaaS not IaaS; direct comparison from technical point is not right.

 

AppFog Cloud PaaS CLI : Basics

 

We are taking a typical OS X 10.8.x with fixed command lines and ZSH plus iTerm2. You can search this website for git commands, UNIX commands for learning more.

Obviously there are official documentation too :

 

 

However, we are describing in the way our visitors are used with.

 

AppFog Cloud PaaS CLI : Getting Started Guide

 

If you follow our previous guide, obviously you already have installed homebrew and Xcode command line tools. To check whether Ruby is installed or not, run this command :

 

which ruby

 

it will show you the path if already installed. Otherwise install or upgrade Ruby and install libksba :
 

 

 

Note : Those who need to update Ruby, but has less knowledge on RVM, can read here :

 

 

af is the CLI part. Install it :

 

 

Next to login you need to run this command :

 

 

For the advanced users, there is some info on Caldecott :

 

 

The base of AppFog is Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry is a PaaS software developed by VMware and is released Apache License 2.0. Other way to install App Fog CLI is from GitHub :