opi

Operations Interface — a project control center for your terminal.

Go into any repository, type opi, and get a usable interface for that project — without configuring anything first.

Status: 0.11.0. Scripts are the main thing; health, security, updates, clean and the commit/push/release workflows are built on top of them. npm, pnpm, bun and Cargo projects are covered; yarn's scripts, health and security audit are too — its update listing is not read yet.

What it does

Its primary job is to be a better npm run. The start screen shows the project's scripts — grouped by prefix, labelled from scripts-info, with the package manager detected rather than typed:

astro-v7-workspace  pnpm
  12 entries · 4 groups

Development
› dev              Startet die Starter-App im Dev-Modus
  dev:blog         Startet die Blog-App im Dev-Modus
Build
  build            Baut Starter- und Blog-App
  build:blog       Baut die Blog-App
Preview
  preview          Vorschau des Starter-Builds
Quality
  check            Prüft das Repo mit Biome
  check:fix        Behebt Lint- und Formatfehler

Enter runs the highlighted script. That is the shortest path, and nothing is placed in front of it. A list taller than the terminal scrolls, and / filters it as you type — in a monorepo that is the difference between scrolling past thirty entries and typing three letters.

Past 15 entries or 5 groups the groups move into a row of tabs and only the active one's entries are listed, because a heading per group over thirty-odd scripts is taller than the terminal:

casoon-web  pnpm
  43 entries · 10 groups · 3 packages

  1 Development   2 Build   3 Preview   4 Quality   …   │   8 Packages
  ─────────────
› dev              Startet die Homepage
  dev:homepage     Startet die Homepage
  dev:insights     Startet Insights
  dev:webcheck     Startet Webcheck

←→ group   / search   H Health   C Clean   S Security   U Updates

A workspace's packages share the last tab rather than taking one each — 52 of them against 6 action groups is a tab row nobody can use — and a divider marks it, because the other tabs name what you are doing and that one names where.

The first group is preselected and the cursor is on its first entry, so opi ↵ still starts dev — the tabs hide what is not needed rather than asking for a choice first. ← →, Tab and the digits switch groups; / searches all of them, which is the case the tabs are worst at. opi | cat lists every group as before: nothing on the other end of a pipe can press a key.

Three speeds, all backed by the same task model:

opi                   # navigate: ↓ ↓ Enter
opi                   # filter:   /dep ↵
opi dev               # direct, no interface

Arguments after the name go to the script: opi build --verbose.

In a monorepo each workspace member's scripts appear under the member's name — only those the root does not already define, since the root's script usually wraps them and wins the name anyway. Where both exist, a bare name runs the root's and blog/dev runs the member's:

opi dev          # the root's dev
opi blog/dev     # the blog package's dev

opi also works from anywhere inside a project, not only from the directory holding package.json.

The script replaces the opi process, so Ctrl-C reaches your dev server rather than killing a wrapper, and the script's exit code is what your shell sees — opi build && … works.

More than one kind of project

A repository can be several things at once, and opi does not make it choose. package.json and Cargo.toml are both read, and their commands share one list:

llmux-dashboard  npm · cargo

Development
  cargo run     Build and run the binary
  dev
Build
  build
  cargo build   Build in release mode
  cargo check   Type-check without building

Every area follows: cargo fmt --check, cargo clippy, cargo rustdoc and cargo test run alongside the npm checks, cargo audit and cargo outdated answer for the crates where they are installed, and target/ is listed with the build artefacts. A repository carrying both manifests gets a section each rather than one merged list — Dependencies and Dependencies (rust) — because "safe to take" orders within an ecosystem and not across two.

Both are external cargo subcommands rather than part of the toolchain, so where one is missing opi says so along with the cargo install that adds it, instead of leaving a section that reads like "nothing found".

In a Cargo workspace opi works on the workspace even when started inside one of its crates — that is where target/ lives and where the checks reach every member. cargo run still follows you: it is offered in a binary crate, because that is where cargo would start it.

Saying more about a script

Optional, and only ever refinement — a project with neither opi nor scripts-info still gets a usable list, which is the whole point.

{
  "scripts": { "dev": "astro dev", "deploy": "wrangler deploy" },
  "scripts-info": { "dev": "Start development server" },
  "opi": {
    "scripts": {
      "dev":    { "favorite": true },
      "deploy": { "group": "Deployment", "confirm": true }
    }
  }
}

A confirm script refuses to run without a terminal rather than assuming yes — otherwise the protection would vanish in exactly the case it exists for.

The other areas

Each is a hotkey in the list and a flag on the command line. Never a bare word: health, clean and release are script names in real projects, and the bare word stays theirs.

astro-v7-workspace  health

✓ Lint & format                     0.2s  biome
✗ Secrets                           1.0s  nosecrets
✓ TypeScript (@astro-v7/starter)    5.2s  astro
✓ TypeScript (@astro-v7/blog)       5.4s  astro

opi reimplements none of this. It detects which tool a project depends on — Biome, ESLint, Prettier, tsc, astro check, Vitest, Jest, fallow, Knip, a secret scanner, cargo — runs it, and relays what came back. In a workspace the checks run per member, in the member, because that is where the tools and their config live.

Output is parsed only where the format is documented (audit --json, outdated --json, audit signatures --json, licenses list --json). Everything else is relayed whole and capped at twenty lines, with the command to see the rest: a parser that guesses at a tool's output breaks on that tool's next release.

There is no health score. A composite number stops meaning anything within weeks; what a failing tool actually said does not.

Taking the updates

--updates can apply what it found, and then runs the commit checks on what comes back — update, install, check, what is red now. That chain is the reason the action exists; saving you from typing pnpm update would not have been.

The choice offered is not safe against major. That is how the list is ordered, and it is the wrong question for an action: in a project whose ranges are exact or ~, pnpm update moves none of what the list calls safe. The real choice is staying inside the declared ranges against raising them, and each line carries its own count and disappears when that count is zero.

opi writes nothing itself. It calls the package manager with a list of names — no package.json, no lockfile, no pnpm-workspace.yaml. Majors are never in that list. Raising ranges is offered for pnpm only, because npm has no command that keeps the operator: npm install x@1.1.1 turns an exact 2.1.2 into ^2.1.3, and an exact pin is a statement. Where two lockfiles disagree and no packageManager field settles it, the offer is withheld and the finding named instead.

Design rules

• Zero configuration. opi must be useful in an unmodified repository. A tool you have to configure first never gets started in someone else's project.
• The project's own files are the only interface. package.json and Cargo.toml — no opi.toml, no second source of truth of opi's own making. scripts, optionally scripts-info, optionally an opi key for refinement.
• No task system of its own. opi does not define tasks with their own commands — that would put it in competition with npm scripts, just, make and Taskfile for no gain.
• Orchestration, not reimplementation. opi is a UX layer over proven tooling.
• opi writes nothing. Clean removes what you pick, updates are applied by the package manager, and opi --hooks adds one line to the pre-push hook without touching the rest. No manifest or lockfile is ever rewritten by opi itself, and where a tool cannot do something cleanly it is not offered rather than offered badly.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/casoon/opi/main/install.sh | sh

That downloads the release binary for your platform, checks it against the published SHA-256 and puts it in ~/.local/bin — OPI_INSTALL_DIR picks another directory, OPI_VERSION another version. Binaries exist for macOS on Apple silicon and Intel, and for Linux on x86-64 and arm64; the Linux ones are static musl builds, so the distribution does not matter.

From the registry instead, which builds it here:

cargo install opi

Unix only. opi runs a script by replacing its own process with exec, so Ctrl-C reaches the dev server rather than killing a wrapper, and its interactive list drives termios directly. Windows offers neither, and a second execution model that nothing exercises would be worse than an honest boundary. Building on Windows fails with that message rather than producing a degraded binary.

Documentation

casoon.github.io/opi — installation, a guide per area, the command line reference and the changelog, with the terminal output captured from the binary.

The files below are the same documentation as it sits in the repository:

• docs/project-state.md — what this is and where it stands
• docs/architecture.md — the modules and how they fit
• docs/constraints.md — the boundaries the implementation respects
• docs/conventions.md — the rules future changes follow
• docs/decisions.md — the decisions in force, and why

demo/ holds the fixtures and the scripted scenes the recordings above are made from, and says what has to be true for a recording to show opi rather than the repository it was recorded in.

Terminal presentation comes from runemark, the shared presentation layer for these CLI tools.

Name

opi is unrelated to OdradekAI/opi, which owns the opi-* crate namespace on crates.io. Installing both puts two opi binaries in ~/.cargo/bin.

License

MIT (LICENSE).