Introducing the SDK and CLI

April 14, 2017   |  Stephen Rosen

Scripting With Globus Just Got Easy!

  • curl "http://transfer.api.globus.org/..."
  • ssh cli.globusonline.org "..."
  • subprocess.Popen(["ssh", "cli.globusonline.org", "..."])

Say "hello" to the new Globus SDK and CLI! As of April, 2017, these products are officially out of beta and ready for use.

The Globus SDK is currently only available for Python, but it provides a simple and easy-to-use interface for Globus services. Handle login flows, get and modify endpoint details, submit asynchronous transfer and delete tasks, and much more. We know that for a long time, scripting against the Globus APIs has been difficult, and it was often necessary to go to cli.globusonline.org to get things done.

No more! With specific attention paid to making login and managing credentials easy, you can write scripts against Globus APIs. Get started right away with a pip install globus-sdk

Read more and see examples in our docs at ReadTheDocs, the official hub for Python documentation.

However, scripting in Python isn't for everyone. Perhaps you don't know the language -- or you know it and just aren't a fan. Having a good CLI is still important for us, but we're providing it in a new way. Rather than having to SSH into a remote machine, the Globus CLI is now an installable tool which runs locally. That means...

  • No more confusing escaping like "\\\\\" to get what you want
  • Plug globus commands into pipelines and subshells -- even use globus commands to produce inputs for other globus commands
  • Use globus login and globus logout to explicitly authorize and de-authorize your machines, no more putting an SSH key onto your cluster
  • Login and logout without needing a Globus ID account

and more! The CLI supports JSON output as well as text, so you can interface with other languages and tools easily. For example, you could integrate globus commands into Ruby with as little as

> JSON.parse(
    `globus ls ddb59aef-6d04-11e5-ba46-22000b92c6ec --format json`)

Find out more on our docs site, including full documentation and installation instructions.

With these new tools, we hope to empower all of you to use Globus more and more easily, from your shells and crontabs to your scripts and programs.

Give us your feedback at

These projects are open source and run transparently, so please give us your feedback, feature requests, and bug reports.