Ready for Liftoff: The Twitch CLI Hits 1.0

In December, we announced a public beta for the Twitch Command Line Interface (CLI) – a tool consisting of a number of features including the ability to test EventSub and WebSub webhooks. The CLI enables developers to test events without the need for third-party software – or even an internet connection! – and at that time we only supported endpoints requiring monetary transactions such as subscriptions. 

Today, we’re delighted to announce the launch of Twitch CLI 1.0, which brings full parity of EventSub and WebSub along with additional improvements introduced throughout the beta versions. 

Before diving into the changes, we’d like to thank the many CLI contributors thus far for adding features, fixing bugs, and reporting issues. Without these developers, we wouldn’t have been able to ship nearly as fast or find some of these bugs as quickly. A 1.0 release is a milestone representing our commitment to provide a community-driven tool that will continue to evolve as the community and our developer products evolve. 

The mission of the CLI has not changed drastically since the beta – it is a tool designed to help developers easily test Twitch functionality through mock events and API commands to retrieve payloads. To that end, nearly every feature added since the beta is in the spirit of that mission.

Changes Since Beta

As noted above, only a subset of the topics for both EventSub and WebSub were available during the initial release. When we considered what a 1.0 release would look like, an obvious goal was to completely support both webhook versions. As a result, we’re happy to announce that both versions of webhooks have full parity in the CLI, including beta endpoints. This means developers can now mock everything, from Raids to Channel Point Redemptions (such as for the Channel Points Hackathon) and everything in-between. 

For a full reference on how to mock each event type, see the CLI documentation or the relevant documentation on the developer site.

Beyond webhook parity, we also wanted to make it easier to download, install, and update. During the initial stages of the beta, we realized that manually downloading and installing the executable into a PATH directory was not a great experience for each release, especially when an update included a new feature developers wanted to use.

As a result, we’ve since added the CLI to both Homebrew (for MacOS and Linux) and Scoop (for Windows). Both tools are package management utilities, providing an easy way to download and install the CLI without any need for placing the executable into a PATH directory or managing versions.

Lastly, we’ve made minor improvements to various other features, including: 

• Support for automatic pagination of API endpoints 
• The ability to revoke an access token via the CLI 
• A tool to verify a webhook subscription method is working properly

Looking Forward and Community Involvement

Obviously a 1.0 release is not a final release. In reality, it is just the beginning of the journey the CLI will take. We’re already working on new features to make it even more useful. Of note, we’re considering the addition of support for sending mock events over EventSub websockets as we discussed during Developer Day last year, among other things that we can’t talk about just yet.

In addition to our own ideas, we want to hear from the community and understand what functionality you’d like to use in the CLI. This project is open to the community via the public GitHub repository to report issues or propose updates. Additionally, we have a UserVoice category to provide feature requests without the need for creating a detailed and more technical pull request. There’s also the #cli-help channel in the TwitchDev Discord server for questions and general feedback.  Let us know your thoughts as we continue building the CLI together to solve some of the common development challenges and making it easier to innovate with Twitch developer products.

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