Theia CLI

theia is a command line tool to manage Theia applications.

• Getting started
• Configure
  • Build Target
  • Using latest builds
• Building
• Rebuilding native modules
• Running
• Debugging

Getting started

Install @theia/cli as a dev dependency in your application.

With yarn:

yarn add @theia/cli@next --dev

With npm:

npm install @theia/cli@next --save-dev

Configure

A Theia application is configured via theia property in package.json.

Build Target

The following targets are supported: browser and electron. By default browser target is used. The target can be configured in package.json via theia/target property, e.g:

{
    "theia": {
        "target": "electron"
    }
}

Using latest builds

If you set next in your theia config, then Theia will prefer next over latest as the latest tag.

{
    "theia": {
        "next": "true"
    }
}

Building

To build once:

theia build --mode development

In order to rebuild on each change:

theia build --watch --mode development

To build for production:

theia build

In order to clean up the build result:

theia clean

Arguments are passed directly to webpack, use --help to learn which options are supported.

Rebuilding native modules

In order to run electron one should rebuild native node modules for an electron version:

theia rebuild

To rollback native modules change the target to browser and run the command again.

Running

To run the backend server:

theia start

For the browser target a server is started on http://localhost:3000 by default. For the electron target a server is started on localhost host with the dynamically allocated port by default.

Arguments are passed directly to a server, use --help to learn which options are supported.

Debugging

To debug the backend server:

theia start --inspect

Theia CLI accepts --inspect node flag: https://nodejs.org/en/docs/inspector/#command-line-options.