Introducing SLY -- An Alternative CLI Tool to DFX for Canister Development and Management

Developers Command Line Tools
1

Hey all, today Psychedelic is announcing SLY, an open source, friendly, and collaborative CLI tool for the IC.

SLY aims to be a streamlined and easy to use version of DFINITY’s DFX CLI. We’ve also got plans to bring templates and a package manager (powered by the DAB package registry) to allow for less cumbersome plug and play development of Tokens, NFTs, and projects on the IC.

For SLY V1 we’re focused mainly on improving the core developer experiences. Some notable features include:

  • Using Cycles Token (XTC) to abstract away wallet control
  • Setting local canister IDs to match mainnet canister ID
  • A Candid Toolkit (checker, parser, and source generator)
  • Communications with canisters
  • Identity management

We’d love to get some devs using SLY asap so we can get feedback to improve on this first iteration! Comment below if interested. To learn more about SLY read our announcement blog post, checkout our website, and visit our docs👇

2

Grateful for the effort that went into this.

Out of curiousity, why not direct this effort into improving the developer experience on existing tools such as dfx and vessel that Dfinity maintains. That would lead to lesser fragmentation of the developer tooling ecosystem and lesser confusion for newer developers.

I imagine the rationale for building this would be so that, in the future, you can incorporate Fleek hosting into these tools as a 1-click easy alternative to deploying directly on the IC and monetize these efforts. But I believe that should still be possible with extensions to the Dfinity maintained tools.

Apologies if the interpretation seems off. Happy to be corrected.