Why Rattail

The Problem

Vite+ has done a great job consolidating build-related work into one tool. But in enterprise development, there are still things you end up wiring yourself:

• Release workflow — version bumping, npm publishing, changelog generation
• Git hooks — commit message linting, lockfile change detection
• API codegen — generating type-safe API modules from OpenAPI/Swagger schemas
• Utility functions — common helpers for strings, arrays, objects, etc.

AI Agent Friendly

An increasingly practical concern — AI coding assistants work better when the toolchain is cohesive:

• Single dependency — one library to learn, not a dozen tools with different APIs.
• Unified Skills — Rattail provides Agent Skills so AI assistants can understand the whole toolchain at once.
• Built-in presets — the toolchain's lint, format, and other presets let AI assistants directly understand the project's code conventions, so generated code naturally follows team standards.
• Consistent patterns — same config-driven approach for every CLI command, same import convention for every utility. Predictable structure leads to more reliable generated code.
• Less fragmented context — all relevant knowledge in one place, rather than spread across separate documentation sites.

Design Principles

• Complement Vite+ — Rattail covers what Vite+ intentionally leaves out of scope, not what it already does.
• Config-driven — CLI commands read from vite.config.ts. No scattered config files.
• Incrementally adoptable — rattail/vite-plus for presets, rattail/cli for the CLI, rattail for utilities. Use what you need, skip what you don't.
• Sensible defaults — works out of the box, with escape hatches when you need them.

What Rattail Does

Rattail brings these loose ends together in three ways:

• Unified configuration — lint, format, staged, and workflow-related options (release, hooks, API codegen, etc.) live in vite.config.ts next to Vite+, so you keep fewer one-off config files in the project root.
• CLI for chores — the rt CLI reads the same config to run publishing, changelogs, git hooks, OpenAPI codegen, and other peripheral tasks.
• Utilities for daily work — the main rattail package exposes a large, tree-shakable set of helpers for strings, collections, requests, and other everyday coding needs.

// vite.config.ts
import {
  defineConfig,
  lint,
  fmt,
  staged,
  hook,
  clean,
} from 'rattail/vite-plus'

export default defineConfig({
  lint: lint(),

  fmt: fmt(),

  staged: staged(),

  rattail: {
    // rt clean
    clean: clean(),

    // rt hook
    hook: hook(),

    // rt api
    api: {
      input: './openapi.json',
      output: './src/apis',
    },

    // rt release
    release: {},

    // rt changelog
    changelog: {},
  },
})