Getting started
Make a project from lith's template, run it, and find your way around it.
What you need
Go 1.27 or later: lith uses generic methods (DB.ViewValue, Writer.DoValue), which came with Go 1.27. SQLite comes as pure Go (modernc.org/sqlite), so no C compiler is involved and every binary builds with CGO_ENABLED=0. A project's tools, templ, air and task, run through go tool from its go.mod.
Make a project
lith-new copies lith's template into a new module:
go run github.com/zweiundeins/lith/cmd/lith-new@latest ~/develop/guestbook example.com/acme/guestbook
cd ~/develop/guestbook && go mod tidy && go tool task test
The app takes its name from the module path's last element, guestbook here, or from -name. Its binary sits in cmd/guestbook, its systemd units in deploy/, and every flag can also come from the environment: -db from GUESTBOOK_DB. With -lith <dir>, the new go.mod gets a replace directive for a lith checkout, for work on both at once.
Run it
go tool task dev
The server listens on http://127.0.0.1:8080 and rebuilds on every change to Go, templ, CSS, JS and SQL files. Open the page in two windows and sign the guestbook in one. The entry appears in both within a tick, and only the window that signed says "Thank you for signing." Sign the same words again, and only that window hears why nothing changed.
What the template holds
The template is a guestbook that uses each rule once: a command, a shared view, a view of the tab's own, and a button that stays pending until its outcome arrives on the stream.
| Path | Holds |
|---|---|
cmd/guestbook |
the binary: serve (the default), backup and --version, and the wiring |
internal/guestbook |
the example feature: commands in commands.go, queries in queries.go |
internal/views |
templ components, and the Datastar expressions they use |
internal/web |
routes, handlers, the live views, the static files and the vendored Datastar build |
migrations |
NNN_name.sql files, applied in order at startup |
deploy |
a systemd unit, a Caddy block, a deploy script with a health check and rollback, a backup timer |
go tool task test vets the code, checks its formatting and runs the tests with the race detector. go tool task build builds the static binary. The template's AGENTS.md points coding agents to lith's skill in skills/lith, which ships with lith and so matches the version in go.mod.
Wiring goes through main part by part, and The first command and view adds a feature next to the guestbook.