Bonsai CLI Demo – Build beautiful Roots themes in seconds

Bonsai-CLI takes a vanilla Roots Wordpress theme and spits out a gorgeous, custom landing page in seconds. Quick demo here–

Five years ago, I started Bonsai—a hardcore, opinionated twist on the Roots Wordpress stack. The dream? A web app, ready for production, straight out of the box.

Problem was, Roots updates so fast, every new Bonsai was outdated the next day.

I thought– what if bonsai was a dependency, rather than a fork of Roots?

All the customizable bits? Stuffed into a YAML file.

Install Bonsai-CLI with Composer, hit bonsai:init, then bonsai:generate cypress. Boom—templates, sections, prebuilt components, custom theme, all in seconds.

The kicker? It’s 100% theme-based—no database migrations.

Need a reset? bonsai:cleanup wipes it clean, back to square one.

Endgame? Spin up production-ready web apps in seconds.

We’re not there yet—this is a sneak peek. Right now, it’s just a landing page build.

Starting today, I’m doing a 30-day sprint—shipping one new thing every day. To hit its peak, I’ll need devs jumping in—building components, stacking features.

I’ve already kicked off Scion—a Bonsai CLI tool that grabs a Sage 10 template, sucks in its assets and data, and primes it for bonsai:generate magic.

Heads up, it’s battle-tested on Radicle v1. It should be compatible with all Sage 10 and Radicle versions– just hasn’t been fully tested yet. After this sprint, v1 stable drops.

To get updates– follow me on X, join the Discord, or check it out on Github. I will be posting updates daily.

Btw, I was using the cypress branch in the demo. Please let me know if you have any questions!

3 Likes

Here’s an update on Bonsai-CLI:

The whole point of making a fully automated build process is so that you can do other things while you build apps.

For me, that’s Nature Coding–

One big update is that I’m using Cursor rules to accomplish most of the to most of my automating now. Bonsai-CLI takes longer to configure, so I will likely only automate the most repetitive of tasks using it, then use Cursor rules to do the rest.

3 Likes

Building out a Roots site from the top of the canyons of Moab is one of the best things I’ve seen from this community :heart_hands:

It’s been really great seeing Bonsai grow, thank you for sharing!

1 Like