Installation¶

Prerequisites¶

Rust 1.75+ (only for building the framework itself)
PostgreSQL 14+
Node.js 18+ (for building the frontend)

Build from Source¶

git clone https://github.com/anthropics/loom.git
cd loom

# Build the CLI
cargo build --release

# Build the frontend
cd frontend && npm install && npx vite build && cd ..

# The binary is at target/release/loom_cli
alias loom="./target/release/loom_cli"

Create Your First Site¶

# Create a PostgreSQL database
createdb loom_dev

# Initialize the site
loom new-site mysite.localhost --db-name loom_dev

# Start the server
loom serve

# Open http://localhost:8000
# Login: Administrator / admin

site_config.json¶

Each site has a sites/{site_name}/site_config.json that stores database credentials and site settings. All CLI commands (loom serve, loom migrate, loom console, loom worker, loom install-app, loom export-fixtures, etc.) read from this file automatically — no --db-url flag is needed.

{
  "db_name": "loom_dev",
  "db_type": "postgres",
  "db_host": "localhost",
  "db_port": 5432,
  "db_user": "loom",
  "db_password": "loom",
  "developer_mode": true
}

Field	Default	Description
`db_name`	`loom`	PostgreSQL database name
`db_host`	`localhost`	Database host
`db_port`	`5432`	Database port
`db_user`	`postgres`	Database user
`db_password`	`""`	Database password
`developer_mode`	`false`	Enable file watching and hot-reload (see below)

Developer Mode¶

Set "developer_mode": true in site_config.json to enable:

File watcher — Automatically watches apps/ and core_doctypes/ for changes
Hot-reload DocTypes — Saving a .json file re-registers the DocType and runs migrations
Hot-reload scripts — Saving a .rhai file reloads it into the hook runner
Hot-reload client scripts — Saving a .client.js file updates the __customization table

No server restart needed for any of these changes.

Docker¶

docker-compose up -d

This starts PostgreSQL and the Loom server. The Desk UI is available at http://localhost:8000.