Forge

Forge is an opinionated, open-source Go + React framework and deploy platform that ships the production system — dev environments, tests, secrets, multiple environments, releases, observability and hosting — from the first commit, built for AI agents to work in.

Most teams build that system in year two, under deadline, on top of a codebase that wasn't shaped for it. With Forge the first commit already has it, wired into files you own and can change.

Try it in the browser first: the live demo.

Quick start

# Install (macOS / Linux; Windows, Homebrew, npm and go install: see Install below)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reliant-labs/forge/main/install.sh | sh

forge project new my-app && cd my-app
forge scaffold service billing
forge generate
forge env up dev

That last command brings up Postgres, runs your migrations, and starts your services and frontends, then prints a table of URLs and a log file for each process, including the HyperDX UI, already receiving the app's traces, metrics and logs. With a frontend (forge project new my-app --frontend web) it also starts a local identity provider, so the app's own sign-in page works on the first run. No signup, no external accounts, no cloud project, no cluster.

Add tables (a // forge:entity message and forge scaffold) and a fresh database is seeded with foreign-key-coherent rows that satisfy every constraint your schema declares, so the app boots alive instead of empty.

When you want it online, forge env deploy staging builds a release once and deploys it. A new project's staging and prod are bound to Reliant hosting; the same environments deploy to a Kubernetes cluster you run, or as host processes, by changing where each workload is bound. Before you call a change done: forge generate && forge lint && go build ./... && task test.

Related MCP server: Nexlayer MCP

Everything included

What a new app would otherwise stitch together from separate tools:

Every benefit, with how to use it and the code that backs it: docs/benefits.md (234 entries, 123 lint rules)

Add Reliant and the list grows an agent harness, cloud dev machines, AI code and security review, and an on-call agent. Forge doesn't need any of them.

Built for your agent

When an agent writes most of the code, the bottleneck stops being how fast you can write it and becomes knowing whether it's right. Forge is one binary on your PATH with no plugin, editor extension or server, so anything that can run a shell command can drive it: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Aider, a harness you wrote, or a CI job. A person at a terminal uses the same commands, so there is nothing an agent can do that you can't check by hand.

• Skills live in the binary. forge skill search <topic> and forge skill load <name> print the playbook for an area, about 150 of them, matched to the installed version. Nothing to paste into a prompt, nothing to drift.

• It explains itself. forge start prints the path from an empty directory to authored protos. forge project capabilities --json lists every verb, lint analyzer and marker, enumerated from the binary, so it can't go stale.

• Scaffolding and lints are guardrails against AI slop. forge scaffold lands each service, rpc, worker or entity in the right place, already wired. forge lint rejects what review misses, names the file, line, rule and fix, and forge lint --quiet ends with the verdict, so the agent reads one line to know whether it is done.

• It debugs from real telemetry. forge obs status, forge obs issues and forge obs trace read a running app's logs, traces, errors and alerts, so a fix starts from what happened rather than a guess.

• Checks never fake a pass. A check that cannot obtain its facts reports UNDETERMINED, never green, never skipped.

• The project tells the agent all of this. forge project new writes AGENTS.md and a pointer for the agent it detects (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot). Any MCP-capable harness can run forge mcp instead: see Use as an MCP server.

To use Forge from any agent, put this in the prompt or its instructions file:

Use Forge (github.com/reliant-labs/forge) for this project.
Run `forge start` first and follow it. Load depth with
`forge skill search <topic>` and `forge skill load <name>`.
A change is done when `forge lint`, `go build ./...` and `task test` pass.

Use as an MCP server

forge mcp serves forge over the Model Context Protocol on stdio. It is in the official MCP registry as io.github.reliant-labs/forge, and npx runs it with nothing to install, no API key and no config. For Claude Code:

claude mcp add forge -- npx -y @reliantlabs/forge mcp

Or commit a .mcp.json to the project (Cursor reads the same shape from .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "forge": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reliantlabs/forge", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

deploy_claimable puts a Vite app or a Next.js static export live with no account and returns its URL plus a claim link that is good for 72 hours. The other tools introspect the project, read the skill catalog, and run lint and generate. Every tool, and the config for Codex: docs/mcp.md.

Opinionated, never a wall

The opinions come from a principal engineer with more than a decade of building reliable systems, and several exist because the unsafe version caused a real incident:

• An error message once shipped a database password to an unauthenticated caller. Now svcerr.Wrap replaces unrecognized errors with internal server error and keeps the original server-side.

• Images built on an arm64 laptop once got pushed to amd64 nodes. Now cloud targets require an explicit platform, and it fails at author time.

• Replicas once half-migrated a schema. Now migrations apply from an initContainer under a Postgres advisory lock, and a failed one stalls the rollout with the old pods still serving.

Every default is overridable and every generated file has an owned seam beside it:

• An ORM you can drop out of to raw SQL.

• A middleware chain in a serve.go you own and can reorder.

• pkg/ as a library you import, not a framework you live inside.

• Each workload binds to a host process, Compose, a cluster you operate or Reliant hosting, in the same KCL. It deploys code it never compiled, in any language: our own control plane builds three services out of a separate repository that Forge never compiles.

More in docs/concepts.md.

Who this isn't for

• You don't want generated code in your repo. Forge writes real files and regenerates them; if you'd rather hand-author everything, the ownership model is overhead.

• You need a REST-first public API. Connect RPC is the native surface; REST URLs are available via Vanguard, but a hand-shaped OpenAPI contract works against the grain.

• Postgres isn't your database. MySQL, SQLite and non-relational stores aren't supported.

• Your backend isn't a container. A service deploys as an image (static sites are the exception: they ship as files).

• You want a framework you'll outgrow and replace. Forge holds structure for the life of the project; for a one-time scaffold, use a template repo.

Install

All of them give you a single forge binary; none needs a C toolchain.

# macOS / Linux (amd64, arm64): no sudo, no prompts, checks the release's sha256
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reliant-labs/forge/main/install.sh | sh

# Windows (amd64, arm64)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reliant-labs/forge/main/install.ps1 | iex

# Homebrew (macOS and Linux)
brew install reliant-labs/reliant/forge

# npm / npx: downloads the same verified binary on first run
npx @reliantlabs/forge version

# Go toolchain
go install github.com/reliant-labs/forge/cmd/forge@latest

Pinning a version for CI, verifying a release's signature, and building from a clone: docs/install.md.

Learn more

• Forge user guide: quick start, project anatomy, environments and deploys, hosting, secrets, domains, observability, troubleshooting

• docs/getting-started.md: the first journey from a checkout, and which files are yours

• docs/concepts.md: why Forge is shaped this way

• docs/benefits.md: every benefit, how to use it and the code that backs it

• docs/mcp.md: forge mcp for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor

• CONTRIBUTING.md: the dev loop, pre-commit hooks and PR process

License

Copyright 2025-2026 Reliant Labs, Inc. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0; see also NOTICE. That covers all of forge: the CLI, the github.com/reliant-labs/forge/pkg/... libraries your services import, the KCL modules, and the @reliantlabs/forge-web-runtime npm package your frontends bundle.

Earlier versions. Forge versions published before this change were released under the Business Source License 1.1. Reliant Labs, Inc., as their copyright holder, also licenses every one of those versions — every commit of this repository, tagged or not, and every published version of @reliantlabs/forge-web-runtime — under the Apache License, Version 2.0. You may use any of them under either license.

What forge writes into your project is yours. Generated code, scaffolded files, and the components forge copies into your frontends become part of your project. Where any of that output reproduces or derives from forge's own templates or component library, Reliant Labs, Inc. grants you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, modify, sublicense and distribute it under terms of your choice, without any obligation to carry forge's license text, NOTICE or other attribution. This grant covers that output only. Forge itself, including the libraries and packages your project depends on, stays under the Apache License 2.0.