Frequently Asked Questions¶

General¶

What is Jarvy?¶

Jarvy is a fast, Rust-based CLI tool that standardizes and automates local development environment setup. It reads a jarvy.toml config file and installs all required tools using native package managers.

Is Jarvy free and open source?¶

Yes. Jarvy is MIT-licensed and hosted at github.com/Cliftonz/jarvy.

What platforms does Jarvy support?¶

Jarvy runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. It uses native package managers on each platform: Homebrew on macOS, apt/dnf/pacman on Linux, and winget/Chocolatey on Windows.

Installation¶

How do I install Jarvy?¶

Five options:

Official installer — curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Cliftonz/jarvy/main/dist/scripts/install.sh | bash (macOS/Linux) or irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Cliftonz/jarvy/main/dist/scripts/install.ps1 | iex (Windows PowerShell).
Cargo — cargo install jarvy
Homebrew — brew install jarvy
Binary — download from GitHub Releases
Repo bootstrap script — for projects that already ship a jarvy.toml, copy scripts/bootstrap.sh into the repo so contributors run a single ./scripts/bootstrap.sh to install Jarvy and provision. See the Quickstart.

How do I update Jarvy?¶

Run jarvy update to check for and install the latest version. Jarvy auto-detects how it was installed and uses the same method to update.

Configuration¶

What does a jarvy.toml look like?¶

A minimal config:

[provisioner]
git = "latest"
node = "20"
docker = "latest"

Can I use version ranges?¶

Yes. Jarvy supports semver operators: ">=1.0", "^20", "~3.12", "=1.2.3", or "latest".

How do I add custom post-install scripts?¶

Use the [hooks] section:

[hooks.node]
post_install = "npm install -g typescript"

Can I set environment variables?¶

Yes. Use the [env.vars] section:

[env.vars]
NODE_ENV = "development"
EDITOR = "vim"

Teams¶

How do roles work?¶

Define roles in jarvy.toml and assign them to developers:

role = "frontend"

[roles.frontend]
description = "Frontend development"
tools = ["node", "bun", "docker"]

Yes. Use extends to inherit from a remote config:

extends = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/org/configs/main/base.toml"

CI/CD¶

Does Jarvy work in CI?¶

Yes. Jarvy auto-detects CI environments and switches to non-interactive mode. Use the setup-jarvy GitHub Action or run jarvy setup --ci directly.

Which CI providers are supported?¶

GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, Travis CI, Jenkins, Buildkite, TeamCity, and AppVeyor.

AI Integration¶

Can AI agents use Jarvy?¶

Yes. Run jarvy mcp to start the MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. AI agents can then discover, check, and install tools via JSON-RPC.

Where is the LLM reference?¶

See llms.txt for a structured reference optimized for large language models.