Tutorial

This tutorial is the CELLAS first PASS journey. Stay on the happy path. Deeper pillar docs come after you have seen PASS once.

Checklist

• Install tooling
• Create a starter
• Verify
• Certify → PASS
• Optional: open the plugin starter

Command budget for the core path: 5. Time budget: ≤ 10 minutes.

1. Install tooling

Install Node.js 22+ and pnpm 9. Confirm:

node -v
pnpm -v

Details: Install.

2. Create

pnpm create cellas my-docs
cd my-docs

You now have a project with README.md, examples/, and cellas.config.yaml. Read only the generated README’s “5 minutes” section — skip the rest of the site for now.

3. Install dependencies

pnpm install

This pulls @cellas/conformance-cli (the cellas binary) from npm once published.

4. Verify

pnpm exec cellas verify

Expect SUCCESS. Defaults resolve to examples/execution-record.json.

5. Certify

pnpm exec cellas certify

Expect PASS. This is the emotional checkpoint: CELLAS is not only documented — it certified your starter.

6. Optional — try the plugin starter

In a sibling directory:

pnpm create cellas my-plugin --template plugin
cd my-plugin
pnpm install
pnpm exec cellas verify
pnpm exec cellas certify

Open plugins/hello-capability/ and rewrite the capability intent. Re-run pnpm run validate.

When you get stuck

1. The generated README.md always lists the next command.
2. Recovery flags:

pnpm exec cellas verify --input examples/execution-record.json --type execution
pnpm exec cellas certify --target examples/target.json --profile reference

3. Still blocked? CLI for exit codes, then Conformance for semantics.

DX quality bar (what we optimize)

Next after PASS

• Edit docs/index.md and re-run pnpm run validate
• Read Plugin SDK if you are extending Runtime
• Browse CLI when you need flags