create-leji

Bootstrap a Leji context layer with one command. Leji is the open specification for the shared context layer of AI-native teams.

npm create leji@latest            # the current directory
npm create leji@latest my-app     # a directory, created if it is not there yet

No install step: npm create fetches the package, runs it once, and leaves nothing behind. npx create-leji@latest does the same thing.

What it runs

create-leji looks at the target directory once and delegates to the leji CLI. It asks no question of its own and writes nothing itself.

| The target directory | What runs | | --- | --- | | does not exist yet, or has nothing to adopt | leji init | | has a docs root (docs/, doc/, documentation/, any capitalization) or an agent entrypoint (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md, .cursorrules, .cursor/rules, .windsurfrules, .github/copilot-instructions.md) | leji adopt | | already has a leji.json | nothing. It names the next command, leji start, and exits 0 | | cannot be read: a file, a broken symlink, or a directory without permission | nothing. It exits 2 |

Only the target directory is inspected, at those exact paths. Nothing is searched recursively, so pointing it at one package of a monorepo classifies that package and not the repository around it. Nothing outside the target decides the answer either: each path is resolved before it is read, and one that resolves outside the target, or to nothing at all, counts as absent. A docs symlink pointing somewhere else is not a docs root here.

It is a heuristic, and it can be wrong: a generated docs/ that is not documentation reads as an existing repository, and a code repository whose only entrypoint is CLAUDE.md does too.

Overrides

npm create leji@latest -- --init     # scaffold a new layer, whatever is there
npm create leji@latest -- --adopt    # scaffold alongside what is there

--init and --adopt force the branch and are the escape hatch when the routing rule reads your repository wrong. They take a directory like any other invocation (npm create leji@latest my-app -- --adopt). Giving both is an error.

Flags

Everything else passes straight through to the command that runs, in order, so every flag it accepts works here:

npm create leji@latest my-app -- --yes --level indexed --name acme-context

leji init and leji adopt do not declare the same flags: --level and --name are init's, --wire-adapters is adopt's. A flag the routed command does not declare is a usage error from leji's own flag check, not something create-leji absorbs, so when you need a branch-specific flag, pick the branch with --init or --adopt rather than relying on the routing rule.

The target directory is the positional argument, or a --dir <path> you write yourself, or --root <path> when there is no --dir, or the current directory, in that order. Both flags take either spelling, --dir <path> or --dir=<path>, as leji does. That is exactly how leji resolves it, so the directory the routing rule reads is always the directory the command acts on. Give it once: a positional plus --dir in either spelling is an error.

Package managers differ in how flags reach the package. npm needs -- before them:

npm create leji@latest -- --yes
pnpm create leji --yes
yarn create leji --yes
bun create leji --yes
npx create-leji@latest --yes

--yes takes every default and asks nothing, which is what CI wants. --dry-run prints the write plan and touches no file.

• Specification: https://leji.org
• License: Apache-2.0