create-getpatter

The npm create shim that powers:

npm create getpatter my-app
# or, forwarding flags:
npm create getpatter my-app -- --mode pipeline --carrier telnyx --yes

It scaffolds a runnable Patter voice-agent project — exactly what getpatter init produces.

What it is

A ~120-line, zero-dependency Node bootstrap (index.js). It does not contain any wizard logic of its own. All prompts, the provider matrix, and the scaffold codegen live in the SDK's setup wizard (libraries/typescript/src/init/cli.ts, the behavioural mirror of the Python getpatter/init/cli.py). The shim's only job is to hand its arguments to getpatter init.

Design choice — why a re-dispatch, not a bundled copy

Two options were on the table:

1. Spawn the published getpatter init (what this does).
2. Bundle / re-export a minimal copy of the wizard inside this package.

Option 1 wins on the principle that matters most here — single source of truth. The wizard is non-trivial (provider matrix, parity-locked codegen, secure .env writing). Duplicating it into a second package guarantees drift: the day someone adds a provider to the SDK, create-getpatter would silently scaffold the old set. By re-dispatching, the shim is always in lockstep with whatever getpatter version it targets, and there is exactly one implementation to test and maintain.

How "spawn" avoids a needless network hit

create-getpatter resolves the CLI in two steps:

1. Local first (no network): if getpatter is already resolvable from the directory where npm create runs (installed in the project's node_modules or globally), it spawns that package's getpatter init directly. Nothing is fetched.
2. npx fallback: otherwise it runs npx -y getpatter@<pinned-version> init, letting npm fetch the package on demand. This is the same network access npm create already implies, so it adds no new dependency at create-time — the package itself has an empty dependency tree.

The targeted getpatter version is pinned in this package's version field (kept in lockstep with the SDK — currently 0.6.3).

Argument handling

• The first bare positional (my-app) is promoted to --name my-app, the ergonomic npm create <tool> <dir> shape.
• Every flag is forwarded verbatim to getpatter init: --mode, --runtime, --engine, --stt, --llm, --tts, --carrier, --phone, --skip-keys, --ide, --no-skills, --no-git, --force, --yes/-y, --help/-h.

Run npm create getpatter -- --help to see the full wizard usage.

Verifying locally

# Build the SDK so a local getpatter CLI exists, then run the smoke test:
cd libraries/typescript && npm run build && cd ../..
node create-getpatter/index.js --help        # forwards to the wizard
npm --prefix create-getpatter test            # full end-to-end smoke test

smoke-test.mjs links the freshly-built SDK as a local getpatter, exercises the no-network resolution path, and asserts that create-getpatter my-app --yes scaffolds a project whose .env is written at mode 0600.