Volter documentation
Volter runs your app against a world: the twins of the SaaS your app depends on, running together on your machine with fake keys. A twin is one vendor's replica, faithful on the wire and stateful. Volter is the tool that runs worlds.
Pick the page by what you are doing.
Learn
- Getting started — your first world, in ten minutes. Every command on the page is executed as a test, so it cannot drift from the product.
Do
- Use Volter World with a coding agent — one command gives Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or Codex the tools; then ask it to set up a world for your app.
- Seed and reset — get a known state, and get back to it.
- Shape the world for a test — the record your test needs, the call that has to fail.
- Run your test suite — point your tests at the twins, and read the log when one fails.
- Run a full stack — app, database and twins together, for browser and end-to-end work.
- Use in CI — the same world on every pull request, with the GitHub Action, and a preview World for each pull request.
- Branch a world — a variant for a feature, a teammate, a CI shard.
- Route a CLI through the world — make
gh,stripe,awsand any other tool hit the twins. - Share a world — one world for the team: everyone clones from it, everyone pushes to it.
- Work from a shared world — start from the team's history, keep it fresh, and know what you are holding.
- Point an app at a shared world — run the app against the team's world and reach the vendor through it: no key in the app, every call logged, a check in the way.
- Read the vendor through a shared world — keep a copy of the account in the team's world, read it from every clone, rebase when it moves.
- Deploy from a shared world — get what your app wrote to the vendor, with a receipt for every change, and a check in the way.
- Host worlds for a team — many worlds under one URL, each with its own token, provisioned through the HTTP API, and a console that shows them all.
- Self-host the platform — the host and the platform on your own machines: people sign in with your identity provider, make orgs and open Worlds as themselves.
- Use the hosted product — sign in, get a token, push from your machine to a world Volter runs for your org.
Look up
- CLI — every
volterverb and flag, and the operator'svolter-world. - Config —
.volter/world.json, field by field. - SDK —
WorldandTwinLogfrom@volter/world. - HTTP API — what a twin and a remote serve beside the vendor's API.
- Platform API — the hosted product's own endpoints: orgs, worlds, members, billing, tokens, activity, support; generated from one table.
- Coverage — every vendor, how complete its twin is, and why it is built in that order.
- Glossary — every word a user meets, and no other.
Understand
- What a twin is — how faithful, what it never does, why it refused that route.
- The model — Neon for every SaaS: the log, checkpoints, branches as positions, the root, push against deploy, checks.
- Worlds — what
upactually starts, the env your app sees, why worlds are cheap. - Data and keys — where your data lives, credential and token authority, and what uses the network.
Contribute
- Contributing — the two-paragraph version.
- Architecture, adding a twin, conformance, gates, coverage, test depth, adoption evaluations, style, and the build glossary.
Planned development is listed in the roadmap.
Runnable examples live in cookbook/.