Project Structure

A standard Alia project consists of the following parts:

my-app/
├── config.json   # project configuration
├── README.md     # mod description (optional, shown on the Mods Space portal "Description" tab)
├── docs/         # documentation directory (optional, shown on the Mods Space portal "Docs" tab)
├── mods/         # installed modules (downloaded by alia add)
├── lib.alia      # library API entry point (optional)
├── main.alia     # run entry point
└── .gitignore    # ignores build/ and mods/ (generated automatically by create/init)

You can generate this skeleton with a single command using alia create my-app or alia init.

config.json

config.json declares the project metadata and compilation configuration:

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "author": "alice",
  "description": "Sample application",
  "tags": ["http", "tools"],
  "homepage": "https://example.com",
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "demo-lib": "1.1.0"
  },
  "compiler": {
    "outDir": "build"
  }
}

Field	Description
name	Project name; used as the package name when publishing to Mods Space
version	Semantic version number
author	Author name (falls back to the logged-in username if omitted at publish time)
description	Mod description, shown on the Mods Space portal
tags	Array of tags (up to 20), used for portal search and filtering
homepage	Project homepage link
license	Open-source license
dependencies	Project dependencies (maintained automatically by alia add)
compiler.lang	Optional default target language; when not declared, every build falls back to js and prints a notice
compiler.outDir	Build output root directory (default build); artifacts are written per language to <outDir>/<lang>/

The optional display fields (author/description/tags/homepage) are written to the Mods Space metadata registry at publish time for portal display.

Build and Run

alia build --lang:js   # compile to build/js/
alia run --lang:rs     # compile and run
alia clean             # clean the entire build/
alia check             # type check
alia start             # run main.alia in interpreted mode

The build preserves existing artifacts and caches, overwriting only the compiled output; only alia clean cleans them up (--lang:<value> can clean a single language directory).

Target language resolution priority: CLI --lang:<value> > compiler.lang in config.json > default js (a notice is printed when not explicitly declared).

The output structure of alia build varies with the target language:

• js: a single file build/js/main.js
• nodejs: build/nodejs/ contains package.json, main.js, runtime.js, and dependency modules
• rs: build/rs/ contains Cargo.toml and src/ (main.rs, runtime.rs)