Reproduce a Stack from tinkerise.lock

Goal

Record a working stack once, then recreate it elsewhere — for a teammate, a fresh machine, or a second project — without remembering every flag.

Prerequisites

Node.js 20.11+
tinkerise installed

Step 1: Create and configure a project

tinkerise web next my-app --typescript --tailwind
cd my-app
tinkerise add eslint prettier

Expected result: my-app is scaffolded and a tinkerise.lock is written at its root. The add step records eslint and prettier into that lock.

Step 2: Inspect the lock

cat tinkerise.lock

Expected output (abbreviated):

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "framework": "next",
  "category": "web",
  "flags": { "typescript": true, "tailwind": true },
  "enhancements": [
    { "id": "eslint", "version": null },
    { "id": "prettier", "version": null }
  ],
  "packageManager": "npm",
  "createdWith": "1.0.0"
}

Commit tinkerise.lock alongside your code — it is a reproducible record, not a cache.

Step 3: Preview a reproduction

Put the shared tinkerise.lock in an empty working directory, then preview what reproducing it will run — without writing anything. --from-lock reads tinkerise.lock from the current directory and creates the new project as a subfolder named by the first argument:

mkdir ../reproduce && cd ../reproduce
cp ../my-app/tinkerise.lock .
tinkerise my-app-clone --from-lock --dry-run

Expected result: the exact upstream command is printed and no files are created.

Step 4: Reproduce the whole stack

tinkerise my-app-clone --from-lock

Expected result: ./my-app-clone is scaffolded with the recorded flags and variant, then the recorded enhancements (eslint, prettier) are re-applied — recreating the full stack in one command.

Step 5: Re-apply enhancements in an existing checkout

If you cloned a repo that already contains a tinkerise.lock and just want its tooling:

tinkerise add --from-lock

Expected result: the lock’s recorded enhancements run through the normal add flow, with the usual skip / replace / merge handling for any existing config.

Expected generated artifacts

tinkerise.lock at each project root
Framework output from the official scaffolder (e.g. create-next-app)
Enhancement-generated files (ESLint and Prettier configs)

Next steps

Add the lock to version control so reproductions are deterministic.
Layer more tooling with tinkerise add — each run keeps the lock current.