The Mendix Service Console does not have a command line interface, but only a graphical user interface to simply configure and run a Mendix app.

To start a Mendix app, firstly the Java Virtual Machine has to be started with some jar files on the class path. The Mendix server listens with an admin handler on a specified port. This handler has a clearly defined API to configure and start the app.

For Linux, Mendix has created m2ee-tools to configure and start Mendix apps via this API on the command line.

For Windows, Mendix has chosen to create the graphical Mendix Service Console to configure (and update) Mendix apps, install them as Windows services and to start these services. The Mendix Service Console does not have command line options to update and start the app.

You can do the update manually on the command line, but if there are database changes needed, the Windows service simply refuses to start before these changes are applied. The app has to be started manually within the Mendix Service Console for the first time after an update, to be able to run the database commands. When the app starts successfully, the service can be started again.

The Mendix Service Console follows the next steps if you update an app:

• the folders 'model' and 'web' will be copied and compressed to a single file in the backup folder (except for the mxclientsystem folder, for which symbolic link exists in the web folder);
• everything in the 'model' folder will be deleted, except for the 'resources' subfolder and its contents;
• the subfolders 'forms', 'ui' and 'widgets' of the 'web' folder will be deleted; the given deployment package file will be extracted (it is a compressed zip file with extension .mda) to the project folder and existing files will be overwritten.
• a symbolic folder ‘mxclientsystem’ will be created in the web folder, which points to the runtime/mxclientsystem folder of the Mendix server.

All these steps can be performed manually on the command line.