Sillo Start

sillo-start creates a Sillo application. It is a separate tool from the framework, installed once and used whenever you begin something new.

sillo-start create-app myapp
cd myapp

That is the whole tool. It fetches a real, working application, renames it to yours, gives it its own secrets, and gets out of the way.

A starter repository, not a generator

A generator renders templates. Templates are checked for rendering, which is not the same as working. A project can produce valid Python, import cleanly, render every page, and still fail on its first real request. Middleware registered in the wrong order, an auth backend reading the wrong claim, a missing static mount: all of them render perfectly.

sillohq/starter is a real application with its own CI. Every push boots it and exercises every route, on three Python versions. What arrives has been run, not merely written.

Three things follow from that choice:

• The starter can be read, forked and improved on its own. It is an application, not a template with holes in it.
• A bug in what you get is fixed by releasing the starter, not by releasing this tool.
• Nothing in a created project depends on sillo-start. You can delete the tool the moment your project exists, and the project will not notice.

What it does not do

Migrations, creating users, running a worker, starting a server, none of it.

Those are the sillo command, which the project has as soon as its dependencies are installed. The split is deliberate: a scaffolding tool that also runs your application becomes something you can never remove.

Creating a project is the one thing sillo does not do, for the same reason in reverse. The framework would have to carry a copy of a starter it would then have to keep in step with.

The manual

Installing	Getting the tool, with and without uv
create-app	Every argument and flag
The starters	What sillohq/starter and starter-inertia ship
Project names	The rules, and the name shapes derived from yours
Personalisation	What is rewritten, and what is left alone
Secrets and .env	How a new project gets its own keys
After creating	Installing, migrating, first run
Custom starters	Using and building your own
Package managers	uv, pip, and the frontend ones
Errors and exit codes	What each failure means
Internals	Fetching, unpacking, and using it as a library

New to Sillo?

The starter is a complete application (auth, an admin panel, migrations, a queue) and it is a lot to meet at once. If you have not written a Sillo route yet, Installation builds a single-file application from nothing in about a minute.

Come back here when you want the wiring rather than the framework.

Requirements

Python 3.11 or newer, and network access to GitHub. The tool itself depends on typer and rich and nothing else.

git is optional. The starter is fetched as a tarball, not cloned. It is used only to run git init in the new project, and skipped when it is not installed.