Serf Commands (CLI)

Serf is controlled via a very easy to use command-line interface (CLI). Serf is only a single command-line application: serf. This application then takes a subcommand such as "agent" or "members". The complete list of subcommands is in the navigation to the left.

The serf CLI is a well-behaved command line application. In erroneous cases, a non-zero exit status will be returned. It also responds to -h and --help as you'd most likely expect. And some commands that expect input accept "-" as a parameter to tell Serf to read the input from stdin.

To view a list of the available commands at any time, just run serf with no arguments:

$ serf
usage: serf [--version] [--help] <command> [<args>]

Available commands are:
    agent      Runs a Serf agent
    event      Send a custom event through the Serf cluster
    join       Tell Serf agent to join cluster
    members    Lists the members of a Serf cluster
    monitor    Stream logs from a Serf agent
    version    Prints the Serf version

To get help for any specific command, pass the -h flag to the relevant subcommand. For example, to see help about the members subcommand:

$ serf members -h
Usage: serf members [options]

  Outputs the members of a running Serf agent.

Options:

  -rpc-addr=127.0.0.1:7373  RPC address of the Serf agent.