CLI reference

The CLI ships as @shortwind/cli (beta) and provides the shortwind command. Run it one-off with npx @shortwind/cli@beta <command>, or install it (npm i -D @shortwind/cli@beta) to use the shortwind command in scripts. The commands below assume it’s installed.

Looking for shortwind cloud? The hosting verbs (login, publish, update, find, delete, and more) are a separate command group for Shortwind Cloud, documented in the Cloud CLI reference.

shortwind new <family>

Scaffold a new custom recipe family file (recipes/<family>.css) with a header, an @guide stub, and an example recipe, then regenerate SKILL.md.

shortwind init

Scaffold Shortwind in the current project: detects your bundler, writes a config, copies recipes, scaffolds the theme, and generates SKILL.md. On Vite it also patches the plugin into vite.config.*; on Next/Astro it prints the one-line snippet to paste instead.

Interactive by default (it prompts for a preset). Pass --preset <name> to pick one explicitly, or --yes/-y to take the default (starter) — both skip the prompt, so agents and CI can run init unattended.

shortwind add <family...>

Copy one or more families from the registry into recipes/. Updates SKILL.md and the lockfile.

shortwind remove <family...>

Delete one or more families. Updates SKILL.md and the lockfile.

shortwind preset <name>

Apply a curated set of families. Built-in presets are starter, app, content, and all.

shortwind ls [--family <name>]

List installed recipes. Filter by family. Useful in scripts.

shortwind build

One-shot: parse all recipes, resolve, expand a target file or stdin to plain Tailwind, and write to stdout (or --out).

shortwind dev

Watcher: re-runs build on every recipe change. Useful when authoring new recipes.

shortwind upgrade [...families]

Bump installed recipes to the latest registry versions. Flags: --check for dry run, --force to overwrite touched files.

shortwind verify

Read-only audit of the lockfile against installed files. Exits non-zero on mismatch. CI-friendly.

shortwind doctor

Run after your framework’s production build. Scans the build output (.next/, dist/, out/, build/ — or --dir <path>) for raw @recipe tokens that survived to the emitted HTML/JS, and tells the two failure modes apart:

• No transform ran — every recipe your source references is still raw. The adapter isn’t wired (e.g. withShortwind()(config) missing from next.config). strict mode can’t catch this case: it lives inside the adapter, so it never fires if the adapter never runs.
• Transform ran but tokens leaked — only some tokens are raw, typically a className built from a variable/prop/template. See dynamic classes.

Exits non-zero on findings (2 when there is no build output to scan), so it slots into CI right after the build step. --json for machine-readable output. The documented rc() runtime escape hatch is exempt.

shortwind lint

Diagnostic pass over recipes/ and your source files. Reports cycles, duplicates, unknown references, unused recipes, redundant utilities, and dynamic recipe names.

By default lint scans src/, plus root-level app/, pages/, components/ and lib/ (the common Vite and Next layouts, with or without src/). If your sources live elsewhere, set "content" in shortwind.config.json:

{
  "content": ["packages/web/**/*.{ts,tsx,astro}"]
}

or pass --content <glob> (repeatable; overrides the config). When the scan matches no files, usage rules such as recipe/unused are skipped and lint warns instead of reporting every recipe as unused. Other flags: --fix, --rule <name> (repeatable), --json.