SAF Documentation

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Overview ​

SAF is Scott's Application Framework - I built it for me, but also I'm making this repo public for people to use and explore as it reflects and is the source of my thinking on my blog. Simply put, SAF is a full-featured web application framework using my preferred libraries and services, and a playground for experimenting with LLM-assisted development.

Guiding principles:

  • Self-Contained. A new app should run with little setup or dependencies on outside services except essentials, such as dependable, trusted email services.
  • Feature Complete. The framework provides the sorts of features you'd expect to have for modern web apps such as CI/CD pipeline, common backend services like background tasks or message queues, and code health reports.
  • Batteries Included. Optional features, services, and utilities are included. These might be simple libraries like common Express middleware configuration, or entire E2E services like sign-up/sign-in flows and an identity service.
  • Easy to Update. It should be seamless to build a new tool in this repo as part of one product and then adopt it with other applications that use this framework. It should also be easy to update to new versions of this framework. This depends on the application having thorough and well-balanced testing.
  • Built for AI. This is my playground to experiment with and share methodologies and tools. Technical decisions and workflows are always made with AI coding agents in mind.

Documentation ​

The focus of the docs on this site are what's in saflib, which contains all the shared code across all SAF-based projects. It is a (mostly) flat list of packages, spanning common dependencies and reusable features. It also stores documentation and workflows for both human and agent consumption.

This site provides a quick way to review the docs, but these docs are also accessible when coding with SAF by searching for their markdown files. Include them as context in prompts, and update them as part of normal work.

Setup ​

To use these packages in a new project, you can create a project from the official SAF template repo. You can also use the SAF website repo as reference. The latter is what builds and serves this documentation using VitePress.

To use these packages in an existing project:

  1. Clone sderickson/saflib into your repository somewhere as a git submodule.
  2. Add the directory as a workspace for your root-level package.json. For example if you added the submodule at the root directory, you'd add "saflib/**" to your workspaces field.
  3. Run npm install or equivalent.

To use a given package, install it as a dependency in your own package. The value of the dependency should be "*" so that it gets the workspace version. At time of writing, none of these packages are published to npm yet.