| title: | 'touch a_website.http.tsx' with the new Val Town CLI!
|
|---|---|
| description: | Introducing VT, the official command line tool to edit, manage, and begin Val Town projects from the comfort of your terminal! |
| pubDate: | 2025-04-17T00:00:00.000Z |
| author: | Wolf Mermelstein |
Val Town is a website that lets you instantly deploy snippets of Typescript to the internet.
Val Town's new CLI, vt, lets you instantly ship a Typescript file on your computer to a fully deployed, scalable, https website or API. No configuration, no bundling, no certificates, just code -> prod!
With vt, you can:
- Watch a folder for changes, so that changes are automatically deployed in less than a second after saving the file
- Manage branches, so you can easily switch between separate deployments, like a prod and test branch
- Create brand new Projects, or remix others' directly from your command line
vt is built entirely in Typescript with native Deno, a modern Javascript runtime, so vt is cross platform. If you already have Deno you can run vt now with vt run -A jsr:@valtown/vt to quickly get started shipping Typescript. If you don't, check out Deno's install instructions here.
vt is also fast! Operations happen concurrently and are optimized. Watch 62 files get cloned in 0.17 seconds!
VT can resolve complex deltas between Val Town and a local folder of Typescript and text files, automatically detecting file changes like renames and modifications.
vt lets you create new projects. You can remix a very minimal http, hono, react, template, with vt remix @std/reactHonoTemplate myNewVal, and then cd into the new folder with cd myNewVal
Then run vt browse so you can view your new, deployed, website!
Then, just run vt watch so that vt automatically does a vt push whenever changes are detected in the folder.
vt takes a lot of inspiration from similar Val Town local dev projects, like my previous local Fuse filesystem implementation for Val Town, valfs, and @pomdtr's Val Town VSCode extension and WebDav server. We'd also like to thank all our beta testers who helped shape vt into what it is, influencing the file naming algorithm, choosing default editor files, and helping us find bugs.
We're excited to keep improving vt! We have a lot planned: automatic reloading during vt watch with a zero-config companion browser extension, a Typescript library exposing vt's internal functionality (like pushing & pulling delta resolution), commands to manage PRs, and more! We love getting to user feedback and seeing what you build! Please join our discord server to share any and all feedback, and how VT has shaped your workflows.
VT is open source, and the Github can be found at https://github.com/val-town/vt!