Introducing vt, the Val Town CLI
Introducing vt, the CLI for Val Town that lets you use your favorite editors and local tools. Now you can use VS Code, Claude Code, Codex and more with our super-fast feedback loop, deploying software instantly as you develop it.
To get vt, install Deno, then run
deno install -grAf jsr:@valtown/vt
With vt, you can:
- Use
vt watchto watch a folder for changes, pushing updates and redeploying instantly as you save - Remix or create brand-new Val Town projects directly from your command line
- Livestream logs from your Val directly to your terminal
- Manage branches, switching between separate deployments or prod & dev branches of a project
We designed vt to work much like git, so vt branch and vt checkout -b work
just like you'd expect. But the real magic is in the vt watch command: vt can
resolve deltas between Val Town and a local folder of TypeScript and text files,
automatically detecting file changes like renames and modifications. As you edit
in VS Code, neovim, or your favorite editor, every time you save the changes go
live. Or, if you don't want to live on the edge, you can use vt push to
explicitly push new changes.
Bring your own editor - and LLMs!
vt works perfectly with your favorite LLM tools: it can even initialize a AGENTS.md file that contains all of the context necessary to write code for the Val Town platform.
People are already using vt to build cool projects, like Geoffrey Litt's Stevens project, a really cool AI personal assistant telegram bot, built locally with cursor and vt. We built Val Town's new Val search on Val Town itself, with Claude Code and vt.
Use the companion browser extension
vt also has a companion browser extension which pairs with vt watch to
automatically reload the tab as you edit your Val.
It's available for Chrome or Firefox.
If you have vt watch running, it should "just work"! The companion
communicates with vt's watcher over a local WebSocket connection.
We want feedback!
vt is a big leap forward in the local development experience for Val Town. But we're always looking to improve and polish the experience. If you have any feedback we'd love to hear it. You can join our Discord server here, and contribute ideas, PRs, or issues to the val-town/vt GitHub repo.