address droplets by name about doctl HOT 5 CLOSED

Few more things to keep in mind

• If droplet B's name is same as droplet A's ID(Unlikely to happen)
• If someone changes name of a droplet or creates a new droplet in web interface.(Add a command to refresh internal droplet id/name cache OR refresh cache when doctl compute droplet list is executed)

from doctl.

Hello, I think this is a valid suggestion, and I have questions about failure cases. Nothing prevents you from giving two (or more) Droplets the same name. What would you expect to happen in that case?

from doctl.

right, I didn't realise, that you indeed can create multiple droplets with the same name. In this case doctl should simply spit out an error..

from doctl.

Something else to note here is that it's completely possible to give a droplet a name that could be identical to a droplet ID (ie. a numeric string).

So it'd probably be safest to explicitly specify that a name is being addressed, eg.:

# shutdown droplet with id = 12345678
doctl compute droplet-action shutdown 12345678

# shutdown droplet with name = "12345678"
doctl compute droplet-action shutdown --name 12345678

from doctl.

As we move more and more towards tags, we'll start using them for this kind of operations, once APIs move more into this direction we should have a better perspective on this but names are mostly for UI only.

from doctl.