cakeui-cli

The cakeui command: scaffold a desktop app, run it against a live dev server, and package it with Nuitka.

It depends on the cakeui runtime, so installing this gives you both.

Install

pip install cakeui-cli
# or, isolated from your project's environment:
uv tool install cakeui-cli

Packaging needs Nuitka, which is an optional extra so that cakeui new and cakeui dev stay cheap:

pip install "cakeui-cli[build]"

Commands

cakeui sync is the upgrade path: cakeui new only lays the generated files down once, and cakeui dev only refreshes them when it starts a dev server itself. sync rewrites the bridge, the TypeScript declarations and cakeui-boot.ts, and re-adds the boot import to the entry file if it is missing. Bridge files are always overwritten; a locally edited cakeui-boot.ts is kept unless you pass --force.

cakeui new supports vue-ts, react-ts, svelte-ts and vanilla-ts by name, but any Vite template works, because the name is passed straight to Vite.

Quickstart

cakeui new my-app --template vue-ts
cd my-app
(cd web && npm install)
cakeui dev

cakeui build produces a .app on macOS (pyobjc only works inside one) and a main.dist/ folder or a single executable on Windows and Linux, depending on mode in [tool.cakeui.build].

Settings live in the generated pyproject.toml:

[tool.cakeui]
name = "MyApp"
entry = "main.py"
web = "web"
web_dist = "web/dist"
icon = "assets/icon"

[tool.cakeui.build]
mode = "standalone"      # or "onefile"
console = false
output_dir = "dist"

icon names a group of files rather than one path: cakeui new writes assets/icon.icns, assets/icon.ico and assets/icon.png, and each platform uses whichever it needs. Replacing the artwork means overwriting the files, not editing the config.

Documentation

Full documentation lives in the repository.

License

Apache-2.0.