› tarjan

Introduction

What tarjan is and the problem it solves.

tarjan brings up a product's entire local development environment from a single config file. Instead of a checklist no one enjoys — clone five repos, start Postgres, install the backend's dependencies, run the API, npm install the web app, start it, maybe boot a mobile app, and wire up the cloud services you can't run locally — you run one command:

tarjan up

It checks the tools you need, clones every repo into a fresh workspace, generates a VS Code workspace so all the repos open in one window, then starts every service in dependency order — each gated on a health check — and streams their logs. Ctrl+C tears the whole thing down cleanly.

Think Terraform / Ansible / .NET Aspire, but for your local dev environment.

Why a single binary

tarjan is written in Go and ships as a single static binary — no runtime, no node_modules, nothing to install just to launch the launcher. It cross-compiles to macOS, Linux, and Windows. The product you bring up can need .NET, npm, Docker, whatever; those get installed lazily, per environment.

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