Introduction
Welcome to Charcole, a modern CLI built to help developers scaffold, configure, and ship production-ready projects with confidence.
Charcole removes repetitive setup work so you can focus on building features instead of fighting boilerplate.
What is Charcole?
Charcole is an opinionated project scaffolding tool designed for real-world development workflows.
Instead of starting every nodejs project from scratch, Charcole gives you:
- Clean, structured project foundations
- Sane defaults based on modern best practices
- A fast, guided CLI experience
- Flexibility to grow without lock-in
It’s built for developers who care about clarity, best practices, speed, and maintainability.
Why Charcole exists
Most starters fall into one of two traps:
- Too minimal → you still spend hours wiring basics
- Too complex → hard to customize or understand
Charcole sits in the middle.
It provides just enough structure to be productive on day one, while staying transparent and customizable as your project evolves.
What you can do with Charcole
Scaffold projects in minutes
Work CLI-first
Use production-ready templates
Scale with confidence
Key principles
Charcole is built around a few core ideas:
- Opinionated, not restrictive
Good defaults that you can override or replace. - Developer experience first
Fast feedback, clear structure, minimal surprises. - Production-minded
Decisions are made with long-term maintenance in mind. - Tooling should disappear
Charcole helps you start, then gets out of your way.
Documentation philosophy
These docs are written to be:
- Practical and concise
- Focused on real usage, not theory
- Easy to scan and reference
- Friendly to both beginners and experienced developers
You don’t need to read everything. Start with Getting Started, then dive deeper as needed.
Next up → head to Installation to create your first Charcole project.