kilocode/cli/docs/DEVELOPMENT.md

Development Guide

Local development on the CLI

We use pnpm for package management. Please make sure pnpm is installed.

The CLI is currently built by bundling the extension core and replacing the vscode rendering parts with a cli rendering engine. To develop on the CLI you need to follow a few steps:

1. Install dependencies from the root workspace folder:

   pnpm install
   

2. Set up your environment file. Copy the sample and configure your API keys:

   cp .env.sample cli/dist/.env
   # Edit cli/dist/.env with your API keys
   

3. Build the extension core from the root workspace folder:

   pnpm cli:bundle
   

4. Change into the cli folder:

   cd ./cli
   

5. Build & run the extension by running pnpm start:dev. If you want to use the CLI to work on its own code, you can run pnpm start:dev -w ../ which will start it within the root workspace folder.

6. While not required, it's pretty helpful to view log output of the cli in a separate terminal while you're developing. To do this, open a new terminal window and run pnpm logs. You can also run pnpm logs:clear to truncate any on-disk logs during development.

Quick Start (Testing Changes)

If you just want to quickly test your changes without the dev server, you can run the bundled CLI directly:

# From the root workspace folder
pnpm install && pnpm cli:bundle
node cli/dist/index.js

Code Hygiene

pnpm test will test the cli specific code, though many changes require changing the extension code itself, which is tested from the root workspace folder. We also have pnpm check-types and pnpm lint for doing type-checking and linting of the CLI specific code.

Publishing to NPM

• Merge the latest Changeset version bump PR to make sure that all changes are included in the CHANGELOG.
• Wait for the Build CLI Package job to finish building on main.
• When the job is done, an artifact will be attached to the action, download and extract the .tgz file inside of it.
• Install the CLI through npm install -g ./kilocode-cli-1.1.1.tgz.
• Make sure that the CLI works (Changes in the extension can sometimes conflict with the CLI):
  • A pretty simple manual testing plan you can run locally within the kilocode folder:
    • Make the CLI increase a number in a JSON file.
    • Ask the CLI to describe the kilocode project.
  • If you're happy w/ the output then continue to the publish step.
• Run npm publish to publish the version after testing is complete.