The Gigantum Command Line Interface (CLI) is a Python-based command line tool for installing, updating, starting, and stopping Gigantum. It runs on Python 3.5 or higher and can be installed with pip.

The CLI allows you to manage the Gigantum Client from the command line rather than using Gigantum Desktop. This may be especially useful when working with a remote server.

This page assumes that you have already installed Docker (if not, see the Installing Docker section), have Python3 installed and are able to pip install packages. Also, this page assumes that Docker is already running.

While we recommend using a python virtual environment to run the Gigantum CLI, it is not required. You can install and start a virtual environment with the following steps:

sudo apt-get install python3-venv
python3 -m venv gigantum-env
source gigantum-env/bin/activate

Once finished with these steps, the virtual environment should be running. This is indicated with the name of your virtual environment showing up before your username in the terminal.

Next, we are ready to install the Gigantum CLI in the virtual environment using:

pip install -U gigantum

This will install the package and an executable gigantum.

The first step when using the CLI is to install the Gigantum Client container. To do this, Docker must be running and the CLI installed. Then simply run:

gigantum install

This will download and install the Gigantum Client Docker container. This can take several minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection. Be patient while it runs in the background after running gigantum install.

Once the Client is installed, you can start and stop Gigantum Client by running the following commands.

To Start:

gigantum start

Starting Gigantum Client will launch a browser and send you to http://localhost:10000. If this doesn't happen, you can manually open your web browser to that location. Currently Chrome and Firefox are supported, with Chrome being recommended.

To stop when done working:

gigantum stop

Note, stopping the Client will stop all Gigantum managed containers, so be sure to save your work first!

If a new version of Gigantum Client is released, you'll probably want to update your server without repeating the whole installation process. To simply update the Client container, run:

gigantum update

This will print out changes in the release and ask for confirmation before updating.

The CLI is pretty stable and rarely updated. If an update does occur and you'd like to update the CLI installation, you should re-run the pip installation command with the -U flag, indicating out of date packages should be updated:

pip install -U gigantum