Your production-grade backend from one file

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Keel

Keel is the all-in-one platform that solves the backend puzzle by combining all the essential technology and tools your team needs to build a business that thrives.

🔥 A fully-managed relational database
🔨 Scalable infrastructure
🦄 A great local development experience
🤝 Flexible and customisable API's
👻 Authentication & Permissions
🌍 Multiple environments
⚡️ Configuration and secret management
🧐 Observability
🚀 Git-based deployments
🎟️ Pub/Sub
💼 Cron jobs

Keel is currently in private beta, join the waiting list for access to the platform. In the meantime you can run your Keel projects locally without an account using the CLI.

Getting started

The best way to get started with Keel is with the CLI.

Dependencies

First, you will need to install Node.js and Docker as they are required to run Keel.

Installing the CLI

Install the CLI globally:

$ npm install --global keel

If the CLI has installed correctly, the following command will respond with the current version number:

$ keel --version

Creating a new project

Creating a new project with the CLI is easy! You can create a new Keel project locally by running:

$ mkdir my-app && cd my-app
$ keel init

This will create a skeleton project containing a keel.schema file, a .gitignore and a keelconfig.yaml file.

Run keel init --help to see all of the available options for init.

Setting up your editor

Keel has created a handy VSCode extension that accelerates your development experience by providing syntax highlighting, autocompletions and schema validation.

Your very first Keel schema

To create your first Keel schema, follow our Basic Tutorial.

Running your Keel app

Now that you've created your first Keel schema, you can start using your APIs by starting the Keel development server:

$ keel run

Run keel run --help to see all of the available options for run.

If everything has been successful, you should see something like this in your terminal:

You can now interact with your APIs at the URLs displayed. For more next steps, take a look at our documentation.

Have fun with your new Keel backend!

CLI Reference

This is an overview of the commands available to you once you are set up.

Command	Description
init	Initialise a new Keel project
run	Run the application locally
validate	Validate a Keel schema
generate	Generates dynamic JavaScript code from your Keel schema
secrets	Add, remove & list secrets
help	Gives extra information about Keel CLI commands

If you want to know more about any of the CLI commands, you can run keel [command] --help.

Contributing

If you would like to build and run the Keel Runtime locally, you can find out how to get set up for development from our Contributors page.

Reporting a problem

If you need help, have questions, or want to contact us for any reason, you can do so by emailing us at [email protected] or by visiting our Discord community.

If you find a bug and want to raise an issue, you can use GitHub Issues to do so. Please try to include as much information as you can, including steps to reproduce the issue, your expected outcome, the actual outcome and any details that could help such as envirnment details, traces or logs.

We hold our values very dearly at Keel, and want our communities to be respectful, welcoming places to engage in. As such, we have a Code Of Conduct governing this project that we take very seriously. If you feel that you have had an experience while engaging with this project that violates this code of conduct and you want to report it, please do so by emailing us at [email protected]. Please include as much detail as you feel able to so that we can look after you as well as we can.