create-watchly-app

Build your own content-aware, screen-side app for the Watchly.ai platform in 10 minutes with the devkit. Learn more about the Watchly hardware at https://watchly.ai

This CLI will scaffold a Watchly Devkit app: it runs create-next-app with --example pointing at the devkit repository, then copies .env.example → .env.local when that file is not already present.

Usage

npx create-watchly-app@latest [directory] [options]

If you omit the directory, the CLI prompts for a project name.

Any extra flags are forwarded to create-next-app (for example --typescript, --eslint, --skip-install, --yes). Run npx create-next-app@latest --help for the full list.

Environment

| Variable | Description | | ---------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | WATCHLY_DEVKIT_EXAMPLE_URL | Git archive URL passed to create-next-app --example. Defaults to https://github.com/Common-Software-Co/watchly-devkit. Set this when using a fork or a pinned ref. |

After install

cd your-project
npm run dev

Open the URL printed in the terminal. In development, use /dev-kiosk to simulate the parent window and send watchly:context messages to the iframe.

For the host contract, embedding model, and WatchlyContext shape, see the devkit README and lib/watchly-schema.ts in the generated app.

Monorepo / publishing (maintainers)

This directory lives inside the watchly-devkit repo. The template/ subtree is a full copy of the app used for packaging workflows; the npm package published from here currently ships the CLI entrypoint (index.mjs) as declared in "files" in package.json.

Before releasing a new CLI version, refresh template/ from the repo root with:

npm run sync:create-template

(from the repository root), then bump the version and publish from packages/create-watchly-app.