Improve vp create completion reporting when installation or formatting fails

[leslieeilsel]

Description

When dependency installation and formatting fail during vp create, the command can still finish by:

• displaying the project as Scaffolded;
• suggesting vp run as the next step;
• returning exit code 0.

In the same command, the user is first shown that manual installation and formatting may still be required, but the final output and process status indicate that project creation completed successfully.

Observed flow

flowchart LR
    subgraph actual["Actual execution"]
        A["Project files are generated"] --> B["Dependency installation fails"]
        B --> C["Formatting fails"]
    end

    subgraph result["Final signals from the CLI"]
        D["Displays: Scaffolded"]
        D --> E["Suggests: Next: vp run"]
        E --> F["Returns exit code 0"]
    end

    C -->|"But the command still continues to"| D

Loading

The project directory and package.json are generated, but dependency installation and formatting do not complete. Despite that, the final message, suggested next step, and exit code all communicate that the complete operation succeeded.

Reproduction

On macOS or Linux, run the following commands in a temporary directory:

workdir=$(mktemp -d)
cd "$workdir"

env -u VP_SKIP_INSTALL \
  VP_CLI_BIN=/usr/bin/false \
  vp create vite:application \
  --no-interactive \
  --no-hooks \
  --no-git \
  --directory create-failure-demo

exit_code=$?

echo "exit code: $exit_code"
test -d create-failure-demo && echo "project directory exists"
test -f create-failure-demo/package.json && echo "package.json exists"
test -d create-failure-demo/node_modules || echo "node_modules missing"

VP_CLI_BIN=/usr/bin/false makes the installation and formatting commands started internally by vp create return a failure consistently.

Actual result

The stable terminal output contains the following lines:

You may need to run "vp install" manually in <temporary-directory>/create-failure-demo
You may need to run "vp fmt" manually in <temporary-directory>/create-failure-demo
◇ Scaffolded create-failure-demo with Vite application
• Node 25.9.0  pnpm 11.21.0
→ Next: cd create-failure-demo && vp run

The recorded filesystem and process state is:

exit code: 0
project directory exists
package.json exists
node_modules missing

My understanding of the behavior

This appears to combine two different states:

1. The project directory and template files were generated.
2. The complete project creation process finished successfully.

In this reproduction, the first state is true: the create-failure-demo directory and its package.json exist.

The second state is not true: dependency installation and formatting both returned failures, and node_modules was not created.

The final output does not distinguish between these states. Instead, it presents three strong success signals:

• Scaffolded indicates that project creation completed.
• Next: vp run indicates that the project is ready to run.
• Exit code 0 indicates that the entire command completed successfully.

Even though the manual recovery messages appear earlier, users will naturally treat the final lines as the authoritative result of the command. This is especially noticeable after a long installation log, where the final summary is usually the first place users look to understand what happened.

For scripts and CI systems, the result is even less ambiguous: they generally use the process exit code rather than interpret terminal text. An exit code of 0 records this operation as successful.

The command therefore exposes several conflicting states at the same time:

Dependency installation: failed
Formatting: failed
Project directory: created
package.json: created
node_modules: missing
Final summary: successful
Suggested next step: run the project
Process exit status: successful

The continued existence of the generated directory is not necessarily the confusing part. The confusion comes from presenting “project files were generated” and “the complete creation process succeeded” as the same state.

Verification environment

• macOS 27.0 on arm64
• Node.js v25.9.0
• Package manager selected by vp create: pnpm 11.21.0
• Confirmed with the bundled local CLI and directly against packages/cli/src/create/bin.ts at commit 29036b2ff12ea30f80088de4a593842df2846c3b