create-zenith ⚡

The official CLI for scaffolding new Zenith applications. Fast, animated, and delightful.

Canonical Docs

• Create contract: framework/docs
• Install and compatibility: framework/docs

Overview

create-zenith is the entry point to the Zenith ecosystem. It provides a signature, high-quality terminal experience for initializing new projects, ensuring you go from command line to localhost in seconds with confidence.

Features

• Animated Logo: A branded, progressive gradient reveal that sets the tone for the framework.
• Interactive UX: Built with @clack/prompts for intuitive arrow-key navigation and clear visual indicators.
• Reliable Fallbacks: Automatically detects CI environments and non-TTY pipes to provide clean, static output.
• Smart Detection: automatically detects your preferred package manager (Bun, pnpm, Yarn, or npm).
• Template Authority: Scaffold generation now reads only from templates/ (basic, css, tailwind), which is the single source of truth for starter projects.
• Tool-Agnostic Output: ESLint, Prettier, and TypeScript path aliases are opt-in. If you answer No, the generated project contains no scripts, dependencies, config files, or ignore files for that tool.

Quick Start

# Using npm
npm create zenith@latest

# Using Bun (Recommended)
bun create zenith

# Using pnpm
pnpm create zenith

Options

| Flag | Description | |------|-------------| | [project-name] | The name of your new project and directory | | -h, --help | Show usage information | | -v, --version | Show version number |

Optional Tooling Contract

During scaffold, create-zenith asks whether to include:

• ESLint
• Prettier
• TypeScript path aliases

Tooling behavior is strict:

• If you enable ESLint, the project gets eslint.config.js, lint scripts, and matching ESLint dependencies.
• If you disable ESLint, the project contains zero ESLint references.
• If you enable Prettier, the project gets .prettierrc, .prettierignore, a format script, and the Prettier dependency.
• If you disable Prettier, the project contains zero Prettier references.

Beta Version Pinning

Zenith beta currently pins @zenithbuild/core to 0.5.0-beta.2.20 and leaf packages (compiler, cli, runtime, router, bundler) to 0.5.0-beta.2.20. This is intentional — core contains the CLI entry point and may bump independently for bin/CLI fixes without touching the engine.

If you see version mismatches after install, delete node_modules and package-lock.json, then reinstall.

Latest Release

• Generated apps now depend on @zenithbuild/core@latest so new installs track the current stable framework release.
• Template downloads now resolve from zenithbuild/framework, which is the active monorepo source of truth.
• Starter templates now live under templates/, and the scaffolder no longer depends on examples/.
• ESLint and Prettier are now feature overlays, so opting out leaves no stray config or dependency references in the scaffolded app.
• Verified scaffold → install → build coverage lives in tests/template-regression.spec.mjs.

Templates vs Examples

• templates/ is authoritative for scaffolding.
• examples/ is demo-only when present and is not part of the scaffold source of truth.

Development

# Clone the monorepo
git clone https://github.com/zenithbuild/framework.git

# Enter the package
cd framework/packages/create-zenith

# Install dependencies
bun install

# Build the CLI
bun run build

# Test locally
bun run create my-test-app

License

MIT