5. Command line interface

There are three primary ways of managing hosts (or clusters of); the web administration, API (Protocol Buffer) or CLI. The smtpd package comes with a program called halonctl that can be used to manage any aspect of the MTA. This section is a guide for that program.

Every command have a --help flag to display available options.

The halonctl program communicates with the smtpd processes over control sockets as described by the Protocol Buffer schemas. The raw response data can be useful when using the CLI for scripting with tools like jq, and the request data can be useful when learning about the API. Therefore, the commands have a --json output flag making it return the raw response and a --json-request flag that prints the raw request (JSON encoded).

• 5.1. Queue management
  • 5.1.1. List messages
  • 5.1.2. Export messages
  • 5.1.3. Take actions on messages
    • 5.1.3.1. Actions and working states
  • 5.1.4. Show messages distribution
  • 5.1.5. Active queue policies
  • 5.1.6. Active queue suspensions
  • 5.1.7. Active queue delivery settings
  • 5.1.8. Moving the queue files
  • 5.1.9. Trace messages
  • 5.1.10. Loading queue files
• 5.2. Configuration management
  • 5.2.1. Script syntax and packing
  • 5.2.2. Reloading configurations
  • 5.2.3. Blue-green testing
  • 5.2.4. Remote configuration
• 5.3. Script engine
  • 5.3.1. Shared memory functions
  • 5.3.2. Cache statement
• 5.4. DNS resolver
• 5.5. Statistics and information
  • 5.5.1. halontop
  • 5.5.2. halonctl process-stats
• 5.6. Metrics summary
• 5.7. Script interpreter
  • 5.7.1. Options
  • 5.7.2. Script interpreter
  • 5.7.3. Interactive shell