Planor: The Cloud Aviator

I’m working with cloud services on a daily basis. Not only do I make use of cloud hosting for my own projects, literally every client I work with is using Amazon Web Services these days.

Most of the time I interface with these services through their APIs. The services that I’m building are being deployed using Terraform, which is what you’d call Infrastructure as Code: Reproducible infrastructure, written into individual files as actual code. Terraform basically reads the code and executes it over the cloud provider’s API. Hence, I usually don’t have to interface with e.g. the awful AWS web interface or their CLI tool – unless there’s something wrong.

When there’s a hick up I normally either have to log in on the cloud provider’s web interface or use a CLI tool they might provide. I neither enjoy clicking my way through bloated and sluggish web interfaces nor remembering query parameters for each of the cloud provider’s individual CLI tools.

In order to simplify common tasks, like checking an instance state or checking a log file for a service, I decided to put together another TUI tool that would allow me to easily perform these tasks from the command line, without having to log in on a website or use a crude CLI.

Planor is a handy TUI program that connects with Amazon Web Services, Vultr, Heroku and soon probably a couple of more services soon, queries information like logs, instances, or CI pipelines and displays it in a consistent way across either of these services, without much fuzz. It uses the official Go SDKs for AWS, Vultr, and Heroku and it renders everything using the awesome Charm TUI toolkit. There is no configuration required, apart from the login credentials.

Planor is open source software and can be downloaded from GitHub. Pre-built releases are available for Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS and Windows.