Output Mode

Withouth any specifications of the output-mode, BOMnipotent Client prints its log messages either to stdout, or to a configured log-file . This is great if it used by humans, but not so useful for automation. This is why BOMnipotent Client offers the two additional output-modes “code” and “raw” . They modify which output is printed where.

Output Streams

In output-modes “code” or “raw”, only the HTTP code or the response body are printed to stdout. If you configure a log-file , any logs up to the specified log-level will be stored there.

If on the other hand you do not specify a log-file, BOMnipotent still wants you to know if something goes wrong. This is why, in this case, logs of severity “error” or “warn” are printed to stderr.

Modes

Code

The code output prints only the HTTP status code of the response to stdout.

bomnipotent_client --output-mode=code health

bomnipotent_client -o code health

200

This can come in handy if you want to use BOMnipotent Client in a script:

#!/bin/bash
set -e # Return on error
# ...other code...
./bomnipotent_client \
    --output-mode=code \
    --domain=$domain \
    --log-level=debug \
    --log-file="/tmp/loggy.log" \
    session login
code=$(./bomnipotent_client health)
if (( code != 200 )); then
    echo "Server at $domain is not healthy!"
    cat /tmp/loggy.log
    exit 1;
fi

Note that there is no newline or carriage return character at the end of the output.

Attention: In code mode, BOMnipotent Client always exits with a terminal exit code of 0 (signaling success) if it can obtain any HTTP code. This way, the program is easier to use inside scripts that return on errors.

Raw

For calls to BOMnipotent Client that access some structured data, the raw output prints the response body, which is typically data in JSON format.

bomnipotent_client --output-mode=raw bom list

bomnipotent_client -o raw bom list

[{"name":"BOMnipotent","version":"1.0.0","timestamp":"2025-01-03T05:38:03Z","tlp":null,"components":350}]

The output can then easily be parsed and processed by your program logic.

Note that there is no newline or carriage return character at the end of the output.