Your first commit: Working on the CLI

July 2, 2026 · View on GitHub

This step walks you through a small change to the rad CLI so you learn how to test CLI changes locally. For the full CLI development reference — running from source, installing a local build, debugging, and CLI error-handling conventions — see the authoritative Develop the Radius CLI guide.

Open the code

Make sure you've cloned the repo and can open it in your editor. If you're using VS Code, run code . from the repository root.

Open cmd/rad/main.go — the entry point of the rad CLI.

VS Code tip: Press Command+P (or Ctrl+P) to fuzzy-search for files. Typing main lets you pick the file from a short list.

You should see code like the following:

editing main.go

Make an edit

Place your cursor inside the main() function and add the following on a blank line before cmd.Execute():

fmt.Println("<yourname> was here")

Replace <yourname> with your name, then save. VS Code auto-adds the fmt import for you, so it should look like:

editing main.go after change

Run the CLI

You could rebuild with make and run the binary, but go run builds and runs in one step:

go run ./cmd/rad/main.go

You should see your message printed above the rad CLI help text.

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