The Instant CLI was designed to drive your Instant application entirely from a project's codebase. You can create apps, define your data model, and update your permissions, all through your terminal.

Init

To get started, head on over to your project's root repository, and write:

npx instant-cli@latest init

This will guide you through picking an Instant app and generate two files for you:

• instant.schema.ts defines your application's data model.
• instant.perms.ts defines your permission rules.

To learn how to change instant.schema.ts, check our Modeling Data. For instant.perms.ts, check out the permissions page.

Push

When you're ready to publish your changes to instant.schema.ts, run:

npx instant-cli@latest push schema

This will evaluate your schema, compare it with production, and migrate your data model.

Similarily, when you change instant.perms.ts, you can run:

npx instant-cli push perms

Pull

Sometimes, you change your schema or rules from your Explorer. If you want to pull the latest version of schema and perms for production, write:

npx instant-cli@latest pull

This will generate new instant.schema.ts and instant.perms.ts files, based on your production state.

App ID

Whenever you run a CLI command, we look up your app id. You can either provide an app id as an option:

  npx instant-cli@latest init --app $MY_APP_ID

Or store it in your .env file:

INSTANT_APP_ID=*****

As a convenience, apart from INSTANT_APP_ID, we also check for:

• NEXT_PUBLIC_INSTANT_APP_ID for next apps,
• PUBLIC_INSTANT_APP_ID for svelte apps,
• VITE_INSTANT_APP_ID for vite apps
• NUXT_PUBLIC_INSTANT_APP_ID for nuxt apps
• EXPO_PUBLIC_INSTANT_APP_ID for expo apps

Authenticating in CI

In CI or similer environments, you may want to handle authentication without having to go through a web-based validation step each time.

In these cases, you can provide a INSTANT_CLI_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable.

To obtain a token for later use, run:

npx instant-cli@latest login -p

Instead of saving the token to your local device, the CLI will print it to your console. You can copy this token and provide it as INSTANT_CLI_AUTH_TOKEN later in your CI tool.