Sending raw requests using the OCI CLI 💻

The OCI CLI includes a raw-request option, as the name suggests this is a useful way to send manual requests to OCI services instad of using the native CLI commands 💻.

For example to list the buckets within a specific compartment I can run the following OCI CLI command 🪣:

oci os bucket list --compartment-id (OCID) --namespace-name (NameSpace)

Or alternatively I could run the following using the OCI CLI raw-request command.

oci raw-request --http-method GET --target-uri https://objectstorage.uk-london-1.oraclecloud.com/n/lrdkvqz1i7e6/b?compartmentId=ocid1.compartment.oc1..aaaaaaaa5yxo6ynmcebpvqgcapt3vpmk72kdnl33iomjt3bk2bcraqprp6fq

This is a fairly simple read request against object storage, to help me understand how to formulate the URL (target-uri) I added –debug to the initial oci os bucket list CLI command that I ran. This provides a wealth of information on what happens “under the hood” when running a CLI command and helped me to understand the –target-uri I needed to use for the raw-request command.

For more complex scenarios, such as creating resources or using a service e.g. analysing an image with AI Vision, you can add –generate-param-json-input to a CLI command and it will generate a JSON file which can be populated with the desired parameters that you can then pass to raw-request using the –request-body parameter.

In terms of real-world usage, the only real use-case for this is with new services that you need to interact with, where there isn’t a CLI command available, with that being said this would mean that you couldn’t use the –debug parameter to help understand how to send the request using raw-request, so you’d need to rely on documentation and/or trial and error – probably the latter!