CLI and Manifest

The Flint CLI lives in the flint-cli crate. It creates projects, serves them in development, and builds standalone release binaries.

Commands

Command	Description
flint new <name>	Create a project from the minimal template.
flint new <name> --template minimal	Same as the default template.
flint new <name> --template tasks	Create a Tasks API example.
flint serve [dir]	Start the development server for a project.
flint run [dir]	Alias for flint serve [dir].
flint build [dir]	Build a standalone release binary into dist/.
flint version	Print the CLI version.
flint --version	Print the CLI version.
flint -V	Print the CLI version.

[dir] defaults to the current directory.

Project Manifest

Every project needs a flint.toml:

[project]
name    = "my-app"
version = "0.1.0"

[server]
host         = "127.0.0.1"
port         = 3000
routes       = "routes"
pages        = "pages"
services     = "services"
repositories = "repositories"

Defaults

If optional fields are missing, the CLI uses:

Field	Default
project.version	"0.1.0"
server.host	"127.0.0.1"
server.port	3000
server.routes	"routes"
server.pages	"pages"
server.services	"services"
server.repositories	"repositories"

services and repositories document the project convention. They are not loaded automatically; include files from them with use.

Minimal Template

flint new my-app

Creates:

my-app/
├── flint.toml
├── pages/
│   └── index.flint.ui
└── routes/
    └── hello.fl

The route serves GET /hello. The page serves GET /.

Tasks Template

flint new my-app --template tasks

Creates:

my-app/
├── flint.toml
├── pages/
│   └── index.flint.ui
├── routes/
│   ├── hello.fl
│   └── tasks.fl
├── services/
│   └── tasks.fl
└── repositories/
    └── tasks.fl

Routes:

Method	Path
GET	/
GET	/hello
GET	/tasks
GET	/tasks/:id
POST	/tasks

Serve

flint serve
flint serve path/to/project

The command:

1. reads flint.toml
2. loads route modules from server.routes
3. loads page files from server.pages
4. binds to server.host:server.port
5. serves with request tracing enabled

Build

flint build

The command generates a temporary .flint-build/ Rust project, embeds route source and generated page source, runs cargo build --release, then copies the binary to dist/<project-name>.

Before invoking Cargo, flint build compiles the embedded route/page sources and validates the route table. This catches invalid Flint source and duplicate or conflicting routes during the build command instead of leaving them for the generated binary to find at startup.

When run from the source workspace, the generated project depends on the local flint crate path. Set FLINT_LIB_PATH=/path/to/flint/crate to override that path. If no local crate path is available, the generated project falls back to the CLI package version.

The generated binary uses FLINT_ADDR to choose its listen address at runtime:

FLINT_ADDR=0.0.0.0:8080 ./dist/my-app

If FLINT_ADDR is missing, the generated binary listens on 0.0.0.0:3000. ASMB_ADDR is still accepted as a compatibility fallback. If the address is invalid or cannot be bound, the generated binary prints the error and exits with status 1.

Exit Behavior

The CLI exits with an error when:

• the project directory has no flint.toml
• the manifest is invalid TOML
• route or page loading fails
• the configured bind address is invalid
• the HTTP server fails to start
• flint build cannot generate, compile, or copy the binary