Commands

The whole toolchain is one binary after the build. These are its commands.

Building

orbit build examples/health_service.orb -o health_service

Compiles a source file to C, then invokes your platform’s C compiler. The executable is the only artifact.

orbit run examples/health_service.orb

Builds to a temporary path and starts it, which is the loop you want while changing a route.

Checking

orbit check examples/health_service.orb

Type-checks without producing a binary. It runs the same passes build does, so it is the cheap command to put in an editor hook.

orbit fmt examples/health_service.orb
orbit fmt --check compiler

fmt is token-based, not regular-expression based, so it does not reformat inside a string. --check prints the files that would change and exits non-zero, which is what the CI gate uses.

orbit doctor

Read-only project checks, D001 through D008, each with a code you can grep for. It can apply the whitespace fixes with a flag, and it changes nothing otherwise.

Serving

./health_service 8080

The port is the argument. A service prints its startup line to stdout, errors to stderr, and flushes both, so a redirected log file stays live.

Measuring

/_ledger and /_ledger/data are running endpoints, not commands. They give per-route request counts, mean milliseconds, and database share, and they exist in every service without code from you.

Versions

orbit --version

Prints orbit 0.1.0. Services report 0.1.0-rc.2 in /health, which is not a mistake: the binary version and the response version are tracked separately until the pre-release cycle closes. The rule for what counts as breaking is in versioning.

Output conventions

Errors go to stderr and ordinary output to stdout, so a pipeline does not capture a diagnostic. Every command supports --quiet and --verbose, and --help works per command rather than only globally.