garn

Please note: garn is still in active development and experimental. Use at your own risk!

garn is a build tool and development environment manager. You configure your project with a garn.ts file that declaratively describes your project and its dependencies.

For example, with this garn.ts file:

import * as garn from "https://garn.io/ts/v0.0.14/mod.ts";

export const frontend = garn.javascript.mkNpmProject({
  description: "My project frontend",
  src: "frontend",
  nodeVersion: "18",
});

export const backend = garn.go.mkGoProject({
  description: "My project backend",
  src: "backend",
  goVersion: "1.20",
});

export const startAll = garn.processCompose({
  frontend: frontend.devShell.shell`cd frontend && npm install && npm start`,
  backend: backend.defaultExecutable!,
});

Anyone can run your frontend with garn run frontend, backend with garn run backend, or both with garn run startAll. All without needing to worry about having the correct version of go, nodejs, or anything else installed.

garn is powered by Nix, so you get portable and reproducible builds and development environments -- all this while running natively on your developer machines without the hassle and performance penalty of using e.g. docker.

Getting started

Install garn

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://garn.io/install.sh | sh

garn needs nix to be installed, so -- if you don't have nix already -- the above installer will install nix first, after asking for confirmation.

Create your first garn.ts file

You can use garn init to template out an initial configuration.

Check out the getting started guide for more information on how to write and modify your garn.ts file.

Commands

garn init

Running garn init in a directory without a garn.ts file will try to automatically detect what kind of project you have and generate a garn.ts file for you.

garn enter

garn enter [project] will put you in a development shell with all needed dependencies available in your $PATH.

garn build

garn build [project] will build the specified project and create a symlink named result which links to the resulting build artifacts.

garn run

garn run [project] will run the default executable for the specified project.

garn check

garn check [check] will run all checks for the specified project. These checks run in a sandbox. The downside of sandboxing is that these checks won't have access to the internet. The upside is that they'll be (almost) perfectly reproducible.

Typescript API

Documentation for the garn Deno library is documented here.