Get started working with Tidal Tools

Here we outline how to get started working with Tidal Tools via the command line.

Downloading & Installing

Tidal Tools is a cross platform CLI utility that you can use to discover and analyze your applications. Easily install Tidal Tools on your operating system.

If you are looking for a full walkthrough of the steps, you can watch a brief video on how to install it on Windows, Linux or macOS.

If you’d prefer to use a cloud shell, you can watch how to get setup in the AWS, Azure or Google cloud shells.

Dependencies

If you plan to use the tidal analyze code command to analyze your source code, you will need to install Docker Community Edition. To install Docker on your system you can check Docker’s documentation directly. Once installed you can verify it is installed and working correctly with the command tidal doctor.

Docker for Windows supports both Linux containers and Windows containers, however Tidal Tools works when your Docker installation is set to use Linux containers. Set up Docker for Windows to use Linux containers.

Why Docker?

You need to install Docker in order to complete the source code analysis. This is because the analysis uses several system dependent software libraries, so by using Docker the analysis can use those libraries without you requiring to install the correct dependencies with the correct versions.

Using Tidal Tools

To get started, from a new terminal or Powershell prompt, simply run:

tidal

To see what you can do with the tidal checkout some of our other articles about creating sync jobs or analyzing your applications via their URLs.

Connecting to the API

Once you have Tidal Tools installed you need to configure access to the API. Register for a free account with Tidal to get the connection details.

There are several ways to authenticate with the Tidal API, we recommend the first one, tidal login, because your password is never persisted to disk.

Tidal Login command

To authenticate with the API type tidal login and follow the prompts. This should provide and store an access token for you that gives you access for 8 hours. Once it is expired, the user must login again and obtain another token.

We recommend that you utilise this command because it doesn’t store your password. If you must store the password, you can authenticate using the methods below.

Alternative authentication methods

Configuration file

Alternatively, you can use the tidal config command to manually set your credentials.

Only your Tidal password and vSphere password are encrypted using AES 256 bit encryption.

For example, you can set your username, password and URL with the three following commands:

tidal config set tidal.email [set your email]
tidal config set tidal.password [set your password]
tidal config set tidal.url https://demo.tidal.cloud

Your credentials will be stored in a configuration file such as:

tidal:
  email: my_user_name_here
  password: my_secure_password_here
  url: https://my_instance_name_here.tidal.cloud

On macOS the config file is located: $HOME/Library/Preferences/tidal/config.yaml

On Linux systems it is: $HOME/.config/tidal/config.yaml

And on Windows it is: %AppData%\tidal\config.yaml

Environment Variables

You can specify your credentials as environment variables. If so, these variables need to be set:

  • TIDAL_EMAIL
  • TIDAL_PASSWORD
  • TIDAL_URL

Dynamically

Alternatively you can pass in your credentials on each request as command line arguments using the following flags:

--tidal-email youremail@address.here
--tidal-password your_secure_password
--tidal-url https://yoursubdomain.tidal.cloud

Testing connectivity and authentication

Once you have set your credentials you can test your connectivity and authentication to the API with the ping command:

tidal ping

Using a Proxy

If you need to use a proxy, you can specify it with the https_proxy variable.

On macOS and Linux you would run:

export https_proxy=1.1.1.1:123

and on Windows:

set https_proxy=1.1.1.1:123

Of course replacing 1.1.1.1 with your proxy IP address and 123 with the port number.

Once you have this set, you should be able to run tidal ping successfully. Remember that you will need to set this for every new terminal session you start.