fadencli

The launcher for Faden — a tutor that runs a course. One learner, one topic, one conversation that lasts months.

npx fadencli

Clones Faden to ~/.faden/app, installs it, starts it, and opens the app.

The command is faden. Only the package is fadencli, because npm holds faden back as too similar to names like faker and sade — so npm i -g fadencli still gives you faden start, and everything below is unchanged.

| | | | ----------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- | | faden start | in the background; -f to stay in the foreground | | faden stop · restart · status | | | faden logs -f | follow the log | | faden update · upgrade | pull, reinstall, restart if it was running | | faden doctor | check this machine can run it | | faden topic … | drive a course with no UI |

What it needs

Node 22.19 or newer, because the server runs TypeScript directly and opens its database with node:sqlite, and git, because that is how Faden is fetched and updated. Bun installs the workspace and is downloaded automatically if you don't already have it — nothing runs on it.

Where things go

Everything one installation owns lives under ~/.faden: the checkout in app/, the database, the workspaces holding each course's markdown, and Pi's sessions. FADEN_DATA_DIR moves all of it together.

The checkout is kept with the data rather than beside it because for Faden a source tree is state — the tutor writes React into apps/artifacts/src/instance and Vite compiles it live, so there is no build output to ship instead. That tree is gitignored, which is what makes faden update safe: a pull cannot touch anything the tutor has written.

Run any command from inside a checkout and that checkout is used, so the same commands work whether you installed Faden or cloned it.

MIT