Spice CLI

spice is the command-line companion to Salusa. It scaffolds new applications, runs a hot-reloading development server, and generates models and migrations.

init

spice init <module> scaffolds a new project from the framework template. It copies the generated layout, replaces the template module path with yours, initializes a git repository with an origin remote derived from the module name, and runs go mod init and go mod tidy:

$ spice init github.com/acme/webapp

The resulting tree matches the layout described in Application & Kernel: app/, config/, routes/, migrations/, resources/, and spice.yml.

dev

spice dev runs the app through Air, rebuilding and restarting it whenever a .go, .tpl, .tmpl, .html, or .env file changes. Builds use the dev tag (running go build -tags dev), so resources/embed_dev.go is selected and template and asset changes are served straight from disk without a rebuild — see Files & File Serving.

$ spice dev

This is also where the --fetch flag (matched by the kernel’s FetchAuth) typically comes in when developing against an authenticated upstream.

make:model

spice make:model <name> writes a model file into the model directory from spice.yml. Names are normalized: make:model my-cool-user produces app/models/my-cool-user.go with a MyCoolUser type:

package models

import (
	"context"

	"gosalusa.com/database/builder"
	"gosalusa.com/database/model"
)

//go:generate spice generate:migration
type MyCoolUser struct {
	model.BaseModel

	ID int `json:"id" db:"id,primary,autoincrement"`
}

func init() {
	providers.Add(modeldi.Register[*MyCoolUser])
}

func MyCoolUserQuery(ctx context.Context) *builder.ModelBuilder[*MyCoolUser] {
	return builder.From[*MyCoolUser]().WithContext(ctx)
}

make:migration

spice make:migration <name...> creates a timestamped migration file:

$ spice make:migration create users
# writes migrations/20260912_101530_create_users.go

The file contains empty Up/Down blocks; in the Up block you use the schema builder (e.g. schema.Create("users", ...)), and Down typically drops the same table. Migration names join the arguments with _ and are prefixed with the current timestamp so they apply in creation order (see the migrations docs).

generate:migration

spice generate:migration is a hidden go:generate target invoked from a model file. It inspects the current struct in GOFILE/GOLINE, builds a migration that brings the schema in line with the model, and writes it to the migrations directory. You don’t run it by hand; it runs via go generate on the model files produced by make:model.

spice.yml

The generator reads a small YAML config, looked up by walking up to the nearest spice.yml (the CLI stops at the first go.mod / git root):

module: github.com/acme/webapp
model:
  dir: app/models
  package: models
  import: github.com/acme/webapp/app/models
migration:
  dir: migrations
  package: migrations
  import: github.com/acme/webapp/migrations

If the file is omitted, app/models and migrations are used as defaults with package names derived from the directory names.