Forest is the back office for operations teams in regulated companies. Ops teams review, decide and act on your data from one interface, or let AI agents do it through MCP, within the roles, permissions and audit logs you define.

This repository is the Forest CLI (forest): it creates your project, boots its agent, and manages layouts, workflows, roles, users and environments from the terminal. Everything you do in the Forest settings, you can script, review and version.

Quick start

npm install -g forest-cli
forest start

forest start takes you from nothing to a running back office: it logs you in, creates the project, boots its agent locally, and gives your coding agent the Forest skills to build on it. Pick a flow:

Flow	For	Command
Demo	Seeing Forest on realistic data, no database needed	forest start --flow demo
Standalone	A Node.js agent generated on your SQL or MongoDB database	forest start --flow standalone --db <DATABASE_URL>
In-app	Mounting Forest in an app you already run (Rails, Node.js)	forest start --flow inapp --stack rails

Add --dry-run to print every step instead of running it. Full guide: docs.forest.app/get-started/quickstart

Requirements

Node.js	>= 18
Account	A Forest account. forest login opens the browser to sign in.

Commands

Run forest help <command> for the flags of any command.

Set up a project

Command	What it does
start	Set up Forest from scratch: log in, create a project, boot its back-end, hand your coding agent the skills
login / logout / user	Sign in, sign out, show the logged-in user
projects:create:demo	Create a project with demo data, no database required
projects:create:sql / projects:create:nosql	Create a project with a Node.js agent generated on your SQL or MongoDB database
projects:create:in-app	Register a project for an app you host yourself and print its environment secret
projects / projects:get	List your projects, get a project's configuration
skills:init / skills:update	Install or refresh the Forest skills for your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode…)

Build the back office

Command	What it does
layout:pull / layout:apply	Pull an environment's layout into forest-layout.json, edit it, apply it back
layout:patch	Patch the layout directly from a JSON file or stdin
workflow:apply	Create or update a workflow from a JSON steps spec
schema:update / schema:apply / schema:diff	Refresh, apply or compare .forestadmin-schema.json

Manage access

Command	What it does
users:list / users:invite / users:edit	List, invite and edit users (role, teams, permission level)
roles:create / roles:copy	Create a role, copy role permissions between environments
roles:export / roles:apply	Export every role's permissions to a CSV, edit it, apply it back
teams:create / teams:delete / teams:copy-layout	Manage teams and copy a team's layout onto another

Develop and deploy

Command	What it does
init	Set up your development environment in the current folder
branch / switch / set-origin	Create, list and switch layout branches, set a branch's origin
push	Push the layout changes of your branch to its origin
deploy	Deploy layout changes to the reference environment
environments / environments:get	List environments, get an environment's configuration
environments:create / environments:update / environments:delete / environments:reset	Manage environments

With a coding agent

The CLI is built to be driven by an AI coding agent as well as by you. forest skills:init installs the Forest skills (the Forest plugin for Claude Code and Codex, plain skill files for the others), so your agent knows how to customize the agent code, edit layouts and write workflows with these commands. Listing and get commands accept --format json, and layout:patch and workflow:apply read their spec from stdin.

Docker

docker run --rm --init -it \
  -v `pwd`:/usr/src/app \
  -v ~/.forest.d:/usr/src/cli/.forest.d \
  -e TOKEN_PATH="/usr/src/cli" \
  forestadmin/toolbelt:latest [command]

Variable	Use
TOKEN_PATH	Where the session token is stored. Must be /usr/src/cli with the image.
FOREST_ENV_SECRET	Environment secret, for commands that target an environment
DATABASE_URL, DATABASE_SCHEMA	Database connection, for the commands that need one
SILENT	Do not log command results (optional)

A .env file in the current folder is picked up; otherwise pass each variable with -e.

Documentation

Get started	https://docs.forest.app/get-started/quickstart
CLI reference	https://docs.forest.app/reference/cli/overview

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, tests and commit conventions.

yarn install && yarn build && yarn test

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.