All recipes

Recipes live inside their pillar in the sidebar — each area's Recipes section sits below the guides that teach the basics it assumes. This page is the cross-area index: every recipe in the docs, grouped by pillar, so you can scan the whole catalog in one place. Each one is goal-first — it starts from a concrete intent and ends with a command that proves the change works.

Preferred NetScript paths

Start with the framework-owned path below. The lower-level alternatives remain useful when you need to integrate an existing host, but they should not be the first construction you copy into a NetScript workspace.

The linked recipe or guide is the canonical sample. When it also shows a general-purpose construction, that alternative is an integration escape hatch, not the default NetScript route.

Web Layer

• Customize the Fresh UI — bring the dashboard components into your workspace with ui:init / ui:add and edit them directly.
• Build a server-validated form — route-bound form state, server validation, mutation, and success handling in one typed page definition with definePage().withForm().
• Build a desktop frontend — one Fresh frontend that runs as an ordinary browser app and gains native capabilities on the desktop.

Services & SDK

• Add a service — run netscript service add --name <service> --with-client to define a typed contract, generate apps/<app>/lib/<service>.ts, implement the handlers, and confirm the service answers on /api/rpc/*.
• Discover services — call another plugin's or workspace member's typed service without hardcoding its address.
• Expose OpenAPI & Scalar — publish an OpenAPI document and browsable Scalar docs for a service.

Background jobs

• Run a polyglot task — define a non-TypeScript script (Python, shell, .NET, any executable) as a task with a permission sandbox and run it through the executor.
• Tune the worker runtime — trade throughput against isolation with concurrency, runner mode, per-task permissions, and timeouts/retries.
• Restrict worker task permissions — give every Deno task explicit permissions; an omitted permission object compiles to --allow-all.
• Add a task runtime adapter — advanced: add a custom runtime adapter to the built-in task executor.

Durable workflows

• Build a validated ingestion queue — a typed queue whose messages are schema-checked before they enter the queue and again before a consumer handles them.
• Publish a durable stream — let server-side state be subscribed to by browsers and other consumers through a durable stream service.

AI & Agents

• Build a durable chat — an AI chat on a Fresh route whose transcript survives reload and reconnect, with one server-side tool.

Data & Persistence

• Database & migration — initialize, generate, seed, and inspect the Postgres schema with the netscript db commands.
• Queue / KV / cron — the reactive KV store, the durable queue, and cron schedules, including --unstable-kv.
• Choose a queue provider — pick the right queue backend, and either let auto-discovery select one or pin one explicitly.
• Use a second database — add a second Postgres, or a MySQL/SQL Server instance, alongside the default database.

Identity & Access

• Add authentication — install the official auth plugin, pick one active backend via NETSCRIPT_AUTH_BACKEND, migrate, and sign in.

Orchestration & Runtime

• Add a plugin — install a first-party plugin, regenerate the registry, and verify the service answers.
• Deploy locally with Aspire — run the full local resource graph from the generated Aspire AppHost.
• Detached start for agents and CI — start and inspect Aspire non-interactively with structured JSON output, timeout budgets, and --isolated parallel mode.
• Deploy — the portability story: raw deno task entry points and the --no-aspire escape hatch when you provision dependencies yourself.
• Deploy to Deno Deploy — push a preview, promote to prod, and read status and logs with the first-class deploy command.
• Graceful shutdown — drain in-flight requests and jobs, run teardown hooks, and close connections on SIGINT/SIGTERM.
• Roll out runtime overrides — change a deployed behavior without rebuilding the workspace.
• Deliver outbound webhooks — sign committed events in a worker, bound retries, and retain exhausted deliveries in the DLQ.
• Author a plugin — advanced: build a custom plugin with the same manifest and mod.ts contract the first-party plugins use.
• Deno LSP code intelligence — keep go-to-definition, hover, and diagnostics aligned across CLI and editors.

Observability

• Add OpenTelemetry — emit custom spans and structured logs, propagate traceparent, and read the traces in the Aspire dashboard.

Not sure which recipe you want? Name the outcome first. "Users must sign in" → Add authentication. "This event should fan out to a background job" → Add a plugin. "It has to run where there is no Aspire" → Deploy. The recipes are deliberately small and composable; most real features chain two or three of them.