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Installation

vexy-formi has two parts: the Python package that provides vfor, and the external formatters and minifiers it runs. You need both.

Requirements

  • Python 3.10 or newer.
  • At least one external tool for each file type you want to process. See Tools and file types.

The Python dependencies are fire, rich, pathspec and chardet; the installer pulls them in.

Install the package

uv tool install vexy-formi

python -m pip install vexy-formi

Check that the command is on your PATH:

vfor tools

The result is a table of 13 tools with ✓ Available or ✗ Missing next to each, followed by a line such as 6/13 tools available.

Install the external tools

You can install the tools yourself with your usual package manager, or let vfor install do it.

Option 1: install only what you need

Pick tools from Tools and file types. For example, to format Python and JSON:

brew install ruff jq

Run vfor tools again; the new tools show as available. vfor caches the result of its tool check for one hour in ~/.cache/vfor/tool_cache.json. The cache is discarded early when PATH, HOME, VIRTUAL_ENV or NODE_PATH changes.

Option 2: vfor install

vfor install installs a fixed set of tools. Read what it does before you run it; it changes your system and writes files into the current directory.

  1. If Homebrew is missing on macOS or Linux, it runs the official Homebrew install script.
  2. If npm is missing, it installs Node.js with Homebrew.
  3. With Homebrew it installs dprint, biome, esbuild, ruff, jq, yq and taplo.
  4. With npm install -g it installs @swc/cli and @swc/core, terser, lightningcss-cli, prettier and html-minifier-terser.
  5. With cargo it installs minhtml, and with Homebrew minify.
  6. In the current directory it creates dprint.json, biome.json, ruff.toml and .vfor.json, each only if the file does not exist yet.
  7. It prints a summary table.
cd ~/my-project     # the config files land here
vfor install --verbose

Updating the tools

vfor update runs brew update, npm update -g npm and rustup update, updates the tools it finds, cleans the package manager caches (brew cleanup, npm cache clean --force, cargo cache --autoclean) and checks each tool. If dprint.json exists in the current directory, it copies it to dprint.json.backup.<timestamp> and replaces its plugins list with pinned plugin versions.

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/vexyart/vexy-formi.git
cd vexy-formi
uv pip install -e ".[dev,test]"

Uninstall

uv tool uninstall vexy-formi

python -m pip uninstall vexy-formi

This removes vfor only. Tools installed by vfor install stay; remove them with Homebrew, npm or cargo. Remove ~/.cache/vfor/ to delete the tool cache and performance baselines.