First things first, if you didn’t know Netlify had a CLI, they do.  One of my favorite things about it running the command netlify dev on nearly any static-site generator project is seeing it detect what it should be doing and spinning the site up in a dev server for you. But not just any dev server, a dev server that replicates the Netlify environment, meaning things like running your serverless functions and making your environment variables available.

Here are five more things you can do with it that you might not realize.

1) Create a new site from a template

That’s right, spin up a new site by typing a single command and walking through the steps. Try it:

netlify sites:create-template

There is a shorthand to the CLI as well! Try the above as ntl sites:create-template

As Charlie Gerard writes in a blog post about this:

At the moment, our templates include a Gatsby and Hugo starter with the Netlify CMS, as well as a Next.js starter. 

2) Manage your environment variables 

The netlify env command, now in Beta, allows you to control environment variables. You can list them out with netlify env:list, get and set (and unset) them. My favorite: move a whole set of them from one site to another like netlify env:migrate --to <to-site-id>.

3) Test serverless functions

By virtue of spinning up your site locally with the Netlify CLI, your serverless functions will run. You can test that they are working and inspect the network traffic and such that way. But the CLI can help you as well, the netlify functions command is capable of testing functions at the command line level. For example, netlify functions:invoke can trigger a function with simulated data.

4) Live stream your Dev environment

Here’s Melanie Crissey on the Netlify Blog about this:

While Netlify’s collaborative Deploy Previews are our go-to for asynchronous feedback, sometimes you need to drop everything and pair on an issue together. That’s when Netlify Live really shines.

For example, just last week, our team was working quickly to debug some funky edge case issues with authentication for the Your Year on Netlify project. Zach Leatherman, who was working on the fix, spun up a local version of the app with Netlify Live. Within minutes, he was able to see the logs, identify the issue, and make a few changes. Meanwhile, I was able to test out the fix before it was ever deployed—without pulling down a copy of his latest version from a repo. Netlify CLI to the rescue and problem solved!

Remember how I mentioned you spin up a dev environment locally with netlify dev? The trick here is to do netlify dev --live. So rather than a localhost URL that only you would be able to see, you’ll get a special netlify.live URL that the world can see.

5) Run netlify switch to switch between different Netlify accounts, like from your personal side project to a work project

You literally auth with the CLI (netlify login, imagine that), so that you can act on behalf of your own Netlify account. Deploy sites and whatnot. But it’s perfectly reasonable that you have multiple Netlify accounts (like work and personal). Running netlify switch makes it trivial to move between accounts.

BONUS!

This video is 50 seconds long and shows how you can go from having some static files locally to a deployed with the CLI:

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