Sending data from shell to Notebook

If you’re an SRE or infrastructure engineer - chances are you spend much of your work time in your shell. Besides querying providers from the Fiberplane notebook, you can easily send your shell command and output data to a notebook to examine and share with your colleagues.

You can achieve this with the run or shell commands in the Fiberplane CLI tool.

The fp run command will run your specified command in a subshell and send the output to a specified notebook.

The fp shell command will start recording and broadcasting your shell session to a specified notebook. It is useful for peer debugging sessions or simply when you want to have an easily accessible command history log for debugging documentation.

Initial setup

Make sure you have the Fiberplane CLI installed and you’re logged in. See: CLI for installation instructions.

Run fp run

You can now run your shell command and send the output to the notebook.

fp run <YOUR_SHELL_COMMAND> -- [ARGS_OF_YOUR_SHELL_COMMAND]

Note the -- supplied before a shell command argument. This is so you can separate flags and arguments intended for the fp command and for the shell command you intend to run.

Fiberplane CLI creates a subshell and runs your command, capturing the timestamp, the working directory, the command, and the output, and piping this data to the notebook.

You can now share the status of your pods and services directly into the notebook by running something like:

❯ fp run podman logs <pod_id>

And here’s how that will look like in the notebook:

Rich output

Currently all of the commands and their output is sent to a simple code cell.

Large text outputs such as logs are easier to parse and read in a dedicated UI as opposed to in a stream of text. Fiberplane will recognize some of these commands and will apply the appropriate formatting for logs (currently supported for Kubernetes and Github Actions logs).

Run fp shell

You can now start recording and broadcasting your shell session to a specified notebook.

fp shell [OPTIONS] <NOTEBOOK_ID>

Fiberplane CLI will establish a secure channel and will start broadcasting your shell commands and their output to the notebook live. Each new command will extend the cell and append the result.

Hit CTRL-D to exit the recorded session and stop the recording. The notebook will save the start and end times of the recorded shell session.

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Note

fp shell will only work with non-interactive shell programs (e.g.: it will not display vim in there)