Introduction
What Caldera is, what comes with it, and how it's put together.
Caldera is a TypeScript framework for web apps, in the spirit of Laravel: everything a real app needs is part of the framework, there's one obvious way to do each thing, and the app you create on day one already has sign-up, settings, tests and a deploy target.
What you get
- Routes and pages. Routes are Hono; pages are React components rendered with Inertia. A page gets its props straight from its route, so there's no API layer to write, and the props are type-checked end to end.
- A database. Tables are Drizzle schemas, with models, migrations, factories and seeders on top. SQLite (a local file, Turso or D1) or Postgres.
- Auth. Sign-up, login, email verification, password reset, passkeys and two-factor, with Better Auth. Policies decide who may do what; teams with roles are one flag away.
- Background work. Queued jobs (Redis, a database table, or a platform queue), events and listeners, and cron schedules.
- Mail and notifications. Mails are React Email components; notifications go out by mail, to an inbox in your database, or both.
- Realtime. Broadcast events to private and presence channels, from Caldera's own server, Pusher, or Cloudflare.
- The rest. File storage and uploads, caching and rate limits, translations, and a test client for every one of these.
It runs on a Node server, on Vercel, or on Cloudflare Workers, and there's a Next.js variant for apps that would rather render with Next.
Made to be read by agents
Every Caldera app explains itself. AGENTS.md at its root says where each kind of code goes and lists your routes, models, jobs and channels, regenerated as you work. caldera mcp serves the running app to coding agents: its routes, its schema, recent errors and logs, and read-only SQL. Coding agents pick it up from .mcp.json.