create-frappe-ui

create-frappe-ui

Create a frappe-ui app in one command.

npm create frappe-ui@latest

It asks where to create the project and what it is for, then sets up Vue 3, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS and frappe-ui with a starter page. You need Node 20.19 or later.

Templates

frappe builds the frontend of a Frappe app. Run it from your app's folder:

cd apps/todo
npm create frappe-ui@latest

It creates frontend/ and connects it to the app:

It lists these changes and asks before it writes them. It never replaces an existing file, and it doesn't add a route rule that is already there, so it's safe to run again. When hooks.py or an existing package.json can't be edited safely, it prints the lines for you to add.

standalone is a plain Vite app with no Frappe server: a prototype, a static site, or a frontend for another backend.

Options

With npm, put the options after --:

npm create frappe-ui@latest my-app -- --template standalone --yes

Without a terminal, such as in CI, it also uses the default answers.

It installs with the package manager that ran it: npm, yarn, pnpm or bun. In a Frappe app, the scripts in the app's package.json use it too, so with pnpm or bun, the servers that build the app need it installed. bench itself has npm and yarn.

It won't write into a folder that has files in it unless you confirm, and --yes never confirms that for you.

Versions

The version of create-frappe-ui is always the same as the version of frappe-ui, and the new project starts from that release: create-frappe-ui@1.2.0 writes "frappe-ui": "^1.2.0", so the project gets frappe-ui 1.2.0 or a later 1.x release.

Releasing

Set the same version in package.json at the repository root and in packages/create-frappe-ui/package.json. The tests fail when they differ. When the change reaches main, the publish workflow publishes frappe-ui, tags the release, and then publishes this package. If this last step fails, publish that version by hand from this folder, as described below.

This package gets the latest tag until a stable version of it is out, even for a prerelease, because the docs tell people to run npm create frappe-ui@latest. After that, it gets the same tag as frappe-ui.

The workflow publishes with npm trusted publishing, which can only be set up for a package that already exists. So publish the first version by hand from this folder, then add publish.yml as its trusted publisher on npmjs.com:

npm publish --tag latest

Development

The package is plain JavaScript with JSDoc types, so there is no build step. The templates are in templates/: base/ has the files that both templates share, and frappe/ and standalone/ add to it or replace files in it. Words like __TITLE__ in template files are filled in when the project is created.

npm install
npm test
npm run check   # type-check the JSDoc types
node index.js --help