Open your own project

behold opens any chant project. There is nothing to add to your project to get the source graph — no config file, no annotations, no plugin.

The source graph, with nothing set up

npx behold preview                  # the current directory
npx behold preview ../my-project    # somewhere else

That serves your project’s declared graph at http://localhost:4600. It shells your project’s own chant binary, so what you see is what your project builds — same version, same lexicons, same result.

Note

preview with no path opens the current directory, so running it from inside your project is the shortest thing that works.

Adding the live overlay

To colour the graph by what is actually deployed, name an environment:

npx behold serve . --env prod

That needs whatever credentials reading your estate needs — behold uses your ambient environment and holds nothing of its own. Nodes become green (managed), amber (foreign), or blue (declared, not yet observed).

If a read fails, the affected nodes report unobserved rather than being painted absent. A resource behold could not look at is never the same claim as a resource that is not there.

Watching for drift

npx behold serve . --env prod --poll 30

Re-queries every 30 seconds and pushes updates to the browser. Add --auto-sync to trigger a committed Op when drift appears — apply to heal toward source, pull-request to open a PR adopting live into source. It is off by default, routes per substrate, and never approves a gate.

Optional: a tier picker

If your project’s source branches on a build parameter — a deployment tier, say — declare it in a .behold.json at the project root and behold renders a picker for it:

{
  "tiers": {
    "envVar": "KMV_TIER",
    "values": ["minimal", "prod", "prod-ha"]
  }
}

envVar is the variable your source reads; behold sets it for the chant shell-out when a tier is picked. No file, or no tiers key, means no picker — which is the default for every project that does not opt in.

This is behold’s own config, deliberately separate from chant.config.ts so a viewer’s concerns stay out of the compiler’s.

If every tier renders the same graph

Your project’s chant needs to resolve build parameters in chant graph, which landed in chant 0.38.0. A caret on a 0.x pins the minor, so ^0.37.x cannot reach it — bump to ^0.38.0.

What behold needs from your project

Nothing, for the source graph. For the rest:

• Live overlay — an environment your lexicons can read, and credentials for it.
• Action buttons — Ops you committed. Sync appears if the project has an ApplyOp, Adopt per foreign node if it has a ReconcileOp, Run for anything else. A project with no Ops shows no buttons, by design.