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December 09, 2024

Introducing Render's New CLI and Refreshed Dashboard

Kate Grosch
Our mission at Render is to handle the complexities of infrastructure so you can focus on building. That mission comes with the challenge of wrangling those complexities into a clean, straightforward user experience. Today, we shipped two significant enhancements to Render's developer experience:
  • Intuitive, context-aware navigation in the Render Dashboard
  • An all-new, interactive Render CLI
To bring these enhancements to life, we spent a lot of time talking to developers—understanding how they use Render, their most common workflows, and how they mentally categorize our platform's features. Along the way, we developed some principles of information architecture and design that apply to any user interface—not just windows on a screen. These principles stem from how humans think, so they aren't specific to a browser or terminal. In fact, a lot of good design boils down to the same conventions as effectively organizing your kitchen.

Keep everyday tools closest

In your kitchen, the items you use most are probably in easy-to-access places, like the drawers just below the counter. More specialized items often go in bottom drawers or the highest cabinet shelves. You could keep everything right on the counter, but that would lead to chaos. The same idea applies to a multipurpose platform like Render: the most common actions should be easy to get to, and everything else should be neatly organized and tucked away. In the dashboard, you'll notice we've added a new menu on the left side of the page. This menu serves as the dashboard's cabinets and drawers, providing a consistent way to organize and find things across the platform. As you navigate, the menu surfaces whatever information is most relevant to the current context. For example, if you're looking at a web service, you'll see Logs, Metrics, and Settings easily accessible on the left:
The context-aware menu for a web service in the Render Dashboard
The context-aware menu for a web service in the Render Dashboard
In the CLI, we used thoughtful namespacing to make sure common commands are easy and fast to run. For example, we made psql a top-level command, so there are no extra steps to connect to your database:

Understand your surroundings

Contextual visibility refers to how clearly you can understand your current environment or situation. You can also think of it as your "sense of place." Using a tool with low contextual visibility is like cooking by the light of your phone—it's difficult or impossible to see everything you need to. In the dashboard, we've improved contextual visibility by adding a navigation header that shows exactly where you are among your projects and services. The header can tell you, for example, whether you're viewing a service in your production or your staging environment—something you never want to mix up! You can also use the breadcrumbs in the header to jump directly between resources, without needing to navigate back to your workspace's homepage:
The Render Dashboard's new navigation header
The Render Dashboard's new navigation header
Contextual visibility doesn't come naturally to CLIs. Unless you've memorized a command (or run it recently enough to find in your history), using a CLI often requires unproductively fiddling with syntax. Learning about new commands requires plumbing the depths of a CLI's --help documentation. In the Render CLI, you'll notice the difference as soon as you run a command like render services. This opens up an interactive view that you can explore with your arrow keys. When you select a service, you'll see the actions you can take—another example of surfacing information right when you need it.

Minimize steps

Improving the efficiency of a common task saves time in the long run (well, usually). That's why the Render CLI also supports a non-interactive mode where you can run any command directly, and pipe the output straight into your favorite tools: Interactive mode can help you write non-interactive scripts even faster: hit Ctrl+S to copy the current command onto your clipboard—including options and flags! The dashboard has some new shortcuts, too. We've added a new global search that lets you jump straight to any service, database, or Blueprint in your workspace. Access it from anywhere in the dashboard—no more digging through menus or scrolling through lists.

Let's get cooking

The redesigned Render Dashboard is live now, and you can follow these instructions to install the CLI. As always, your feedback drives us forward, so please share your thoughts. This update lays the foundation for future enhancements, and we’re excited to keep building a platform that grows with your needs. And if you're wondering, "Did something disappear?" - don’t worry! Nothing’s been removed, just restructured to make more sense. Welcome to a faster, clearer Render experience.