Developing locally

Most of the time you build your app by chatting with your AI and letting onvibe deploy it. But sometimes you want to iterate on your own machine — fast, offline, poking at the code directly — before you ship. onvibe-dev gives you exactly that, without the usual "works on my machine, breaks in production" tax.

Nothing to install

There's no package to add and no account to wire up. From a folder with your app's code, run:

npx https://onvibe.run/onvibe-dev.tgz ./app

That's it — your app starts on localhost. (You'll need Deno installed; the tool checks and tells you if it's missing.)

A runtime that matches production

onvibe-dev isn't a rough approximation — it's a high-fidelity runtime. It runs your app with the same platform helpers and the same services you get live:

File uploads and signed download URLs (backed by local disk while you develop).
Public assets.
Email sending (logged to your console instead of actually sent).
A simulated auth edge that signs the current user's identity exactly like production does — so currentUser() behaves the same locally as it does when deployed.

Your app code and the helpers are byte-identical to what runs live, so the behaviour you see on localhost is the behaviour you'll get after you deploy.

Developing against real data

Need a real database while you work? Ask onvibe-dev for an ephemeral development database — a temporary Postgres, created on demand and reached over a secure tunnel through onvibe. Your database is never exposed to the public internet; the tunnel bridges your local process to it and tears everything down when you're finished. There are per-account limits so things stay tidy.

The workflow

Run npx https://onvibe.run/onvibe-dev.tgz ./app to start locally.
Edit your code and refresh — iterate as fast as you like, offline.
When it looks right, deploy through your AI and ship with confidence that local behaviour carries over.

Local development is optional — you never need it — but when you want tight, hands-on iteration, it's there.