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Overview

Raid is a CLI tool that lets you define your entire development environment — repositories, install steps, environment configs, and team commands — in a single YAML profile. Check it in, share it with the team, and anyone can go from a blank machine to a fully running environment with one command.

Key Concepts​

Profiles​

A profile is a YAML file that describes everything about your development environment: which repositories to clone, what to run during setup, how to handle environments, and what commands are available to the team.

Profiles are shared — check one into a repo, host it at a URL, or distribute it however your team prefers. When a teammate runs raid profile add, they get the same setup as everyone else.

name: "platform"

repositories:
  - name: "api"
    url: "[email protected]:my-org/api.git"
    path: "~/dev/api"
  - name: "frontend"
    url: "[email protected]:my-org/frontend.git"
    path: "~/dev/frontend"

→ See Profile Configuration

Environments​

Environments are named configurations — sets of variables and tasks — that can be applied across all repositories at once. Switching from local to staging is a single command: raid env staging.

Each environment can write .env files, run setup scripts, or prompt for confirmation before applying. Repositories define their own environment variables in their raid.yaml, which are merged with the profile-level environment when applied.

environments:
  - name: "local"
    variables:
      - name: "LOG_LEVEL"
        value: "debug"
    tasks:
      - type: Shell
        cmd: "docker-compose up -d db"
  - name: "production"
    tasks:
      - type: Confirm
        message: "Switch to production?"

→ See Environments

Tasks​

Tasks are the unit of work in raid. They appear in install steps, commands, and environment definitions. Every task has a type and type-specific fields.

Raid ships with task types for running shell commands, rendering templates, prompting for input, waiting for services, performing git operations, and more.

tasks:
  - type: Shell
    cmd: "npm install"
  - type: Wait
    url: "http://localhost:3000/health"
    timeout: "30s"
  - type: Print
    message: "Ready."
    color: "green"

→ See Task Types

Commands​

Commands are custom CLI commands defined in your profile or in a repository's raid.yaml. Once defined, they're available to everyone on the team as raid <name>.

Use commands to encode team workflows — deployments, migrations, test runs — so no one has to remember the exact steps or ask a colleague.

commands:
  - name: "deploy"
    usage: "Deploy all services to staging"
    tasks:
      - type: Shell
        cmd: "./scripts/deploy.sh"
        path: "~/dev/api"

→ See Custom Commands

Next steps​