constitution-cli

The framework's engine and installer. constitution init scaffolds the framework into a product repo — package-managed distribution per ADR-0001; the files it writes are read-only build artifacts, not hand-vendored copies. Beyond init, the binary is the deterministic governance engine: audit, firewall/lock, compile, render/tones, feature/board, doctor, proposals/ratify — run constitution --help, and see ../docs/quickstart.md for the workflow. Engine code lives in src/engine/ (see AGENTS.md for its statutes, including determinism and the failing-first test rule); tests in test/ run via npm test. Engineering conventions for this package's own code are in AGENTS.md, not here.

Status

Published to the public npm registry as constitution-cli (repo: chinmaygit/constitution_project). No token needed to install — GitHub Packages required one even for public packages (a platform limitation), which is why this moved to npmjs.org.

Usage

npm install --save-dev constitution-cli
npx constitution init

constitution with no command, --help, or an unrecognized command prints usage and does not launch the interactive scaffold — only init does. --version prints the installed version.

Building from source (this repo)

cd cli/
npm install
npm run build        # vendors skills/, templates/, process/ into cli/, then compiles

npm run build runs scripts/vendor.js first (via prebuild) — it copies skills/, templates/, process/ from the framework repo root into cli/, since a published package can only contain files inside cli/ itself, not sibling directories. The vendored copies are gitignored build artifacts, same as dist/ — never hand-edited.

Then, from the target product repo (the CLI reads process.cwd()):

node <path-to-this-framework-repo>/cli/dist/index.js init

It prompts for a project name, a ratifier name, and target agents (Cursor / Claude / Antigravity / Copilot), then writes CONSTITUTION.md (skipped if one already exists, generated from templates/constitution.md — never hand-written inline, so it can't drift from the template) and AGENTS.md (safe-appends a governance-map block from templates/governance-map.md if one isn't there yet), and per-agent skill copies: .claude/skills/, .agents/skills/, .cursor/rules/.

There is no distinct "upgrade" mode yet — re-running init re-prompts and overwrites the skill copies with the current source. That's a known gap, not a hidden feature.

Known gap: init always writes a fresh CONSTITUTION.md/AGENTS.md at the target root — it doesn't yet detect an existing constitution living somewhere else (e.g. decisions/CONSTITUTION.md) or a governance map already living inside a CLAUDE.md instead of AGENTS.md. Running init against a repo shaped that way produces confusing duplicate stub files; check for an existing constitution before running it, and clean up manually if it writes the wrong thing.

What this is not

Not how you, the operator working across many repos on one machine, get live access to the framework's own skills — that's skills/sync-operator, which symlinks instead of copying because you're working directly against this repo's source. This CLI is for everyone else who needs the framework in a repo: other contributors, CI, any machine that isn't yours.