initup

The deterministic hands your AI agent uses to touch your project.

Your coding agent is brilliant at deciding what to do and unreliable at doing it the same way twice. Ask it to "add HeroUI" and it searches docs, guesses, and maybe pastes HeroUI v2's HeroUIProvider that v3 deleted — and if step 4 fails, you're left with a half-migrated project to untangle by hand.

initup is the tool the agent calls instead. Adding a technology is one deterministic operation — install the deps and patch every config and generate the code — and if anything fails, it rolls the whole thing back to exactly where you started.

agent: "add mongodb to the api"
  → initup add_plugin("mongodb")
      install mongoose · write .env · src/config/mongo.ts · wire server.ts
      ✗ npm install failed
      ↩ rolled back — every file restored, nothing left behind

That rollback is the whole point. It's what makes it safe to let an autonomous agent modify your codebase: the worst case is a clean no-op, never a broken tree. Same input → same result, every time.

Install

npm i -g initup      # or: npx initup <command>

Use it

initup detect [--json]          # fingerprint the project
initup add heroui [--app web]   # install + patch + generate, transactionally
initup manage                   # interactive: app → plugin
initup doctor [--json]          # report project health
initup pack ./plugins/heroui    # author folder → single distributable JSON
initup make plugins/x/plugin.ts # compile a typed plugin.ts → single JSON

--json keeps stdout pure JSON (for scripts/agents), --silent skips prompts, --yes auto-approves the consent gate. A third-party plugin needing exec/network shows a dry-run plan and asks before touching disk.

Write a plugin

import { definePlugin } from "initup";

export default definePlugin({
  name: "tailwind-v4",
  displayName: "Tailwind CSS v4",
  version: "1.0.0",
  appliesTo: { framework: "react" },
  languages: ["ts", "js"],
  capabilities: { install: true, exec: false, network: false },
  detect: { dependency: "tailwindcss" },
  prompts: [],
  setup: async (ctx) => {
    ctx.installDev(["tailwindcss", "@tailwindcss/vite"]);
    ctx.patchConfig(ctx.configFile("vite") ?? "vite.config.ts", {
      ensureImport: { tailwindcss: "@tailwindcss/vite" },
      addToArray: { path: "plugins", value: "tailwindcss()" },
    });
    ctx.ensureLine(ctx.stylesheet({ createIfMissing: true }),
      '@import "tailwindcss";', { position: "top" });
  },
});

Compile it: initup make plugins/tailwind-v4/plugin.ts → a single distributable JSON.

Docs

Full guides, the complete ctx API reference, the execution model, and 30+ first-party plugins (JS/TS and Python) live in the repo:

https://github.com/Krishnesh-Mishra/initup

MIT © Krishnesh Mishra