The Official Starters

Two starters are published. Both are real applications with their own CI.

sillohq/starter	Server-rendered pages and a JSON API. The default.
sillohq/starter-inertia	The same application with a React or Vue frontend over Inertia.js.

sillo-start create-app myapp                              # the default
sillo-start create-app sillohq/starter-inertia myapp      # Inertia

Choosing

Take the default when your pages are pages: forms that post and redirect, server-rendered HTML, an admin panel, a JSON API for whatever else needs one. It has no build step and no node_modules.

Take Inertia when you want React or Vue components with the routing, validation and auth still on the Python side. You get a frontend without writing an API for your own frontend to consume.

You are not locked in either way. Inertia is a dependency and a mount, and can be added to a project that started without it.

What sillohq/starter ships

app/
  bootstrap.py       assembling the application
  config.py          typed settings, read from .env
  main.py            the ASGI entrypoint — `app.main:app`
  admin.py           what the admin panel exposes
  templating.py      template engine setup
  jobs/              queued job classes
  tasks/             scheduled tasks
database/
  config.py          connection settings
  models/            your models; `user.py` to begin with
  migrations/        `0001_initial.py`, committed
routes/
  api.py             the JSON API
  auth.py            sign in, sign out, register
  web.py             server-rendered pages
templates/           HTML
static/              CSS
tests/               a working suite, with fixtures
storage/             SQLite lives here; gitignored
scripts/smoke.py     boots the app and calls every route

Plus .env.example, pyproject.toml, .github/workflows/ci.yml, a Makefile and a README.md.

What is already wired

• Session authentication against a real user model, not a stub.
• The admin panel, at /admin/.
• Migrations, with the initial one committed, so sillo db:migrate on a fresh clone produces a working database rather than an empty one.
• A queue and a scheduler, with the directories to put work in.
• Tests, including fixtures for an authenticated client.
• CI that boots the application and calls every route, on three Python versions.

That last one is why this is a repository rather than a template. See why a starter.

Dependencies

sillo-framework[hashing-bcrypt,record,templating]
aiosqlite
email-validator

SQLite by default, so there is nothing to run before the first request. Swap the driver for asyncpg or asyncmy and change DATABASE_URL when you want a server. See Database setup.

What sillohq/starter-inertia ships

The same Python application, plus:

js/
  main.tsx           the client entrypoint
  app.css            styles
  types.ts, ui.ts    shared frontend types and helpers
views/
  Layout.tsx         the shell every page renders into
  pages/             one component per page
root.html            the single HTML document Inertia substitutes into
app/inertia.py       the adapter's configuration
vite.config.ts       the frontend build
package.json

And it drops Jinja: the only HTML it serves is root.html, which the Inertia adapter reads and substitutes into directly. Every other page is a component. Installing a template engine to render one static file would be a dependency never called.

Dependencies

sillo-framework[cache,hashing-bcrypt,record]
sillo-inertia
aiosqlite
email-validator

Note the absence of templating. See Inertia for the frontend side.

The Makefile

Both starters ship one, and you can ignore it. Every target is a plain sillo, uvicorn or pytest invocation. It exists so make on its own lists what a project can do, not because anything depends on it.

The documentation uses the underlying commands throughout, so nothing here requires make to be installed.

Using a different one

Any public GitHub repository works:

sillo-start create-app acme/our-template myapp

See Custom starters for what makes a repository work well as one.