Two days ago I published “I Built a CLI That Generates Production-Ready Auth Backends in 30 Seconds (While Working From My Phone)”.
At that point the project had 177 tracked runs.
Since then… things got interesting.
As of April 22 (just 48 hours later):
270+ tracked real runs (internal telemetry)
160 runs in a single day (April 21 launch day)
143 of those 160 runs came directly from the GitHub repo done by only 5 unique people
Yes, you read that right.
Five strangers landed on the repo, read the README, and between them ran npx create-authenik8-app 143 times in one day.
That kind of repeat usage from a tiny group of early visitors is the best validation I could ask for.
And yesterday something even better happened.
I created a few small “[Good First Issue]” labels, including one for adding a clean production-ready /health endpoint to the generated Express + TypeScript templates.
Within hours, snakefood3232
replied saying:
“I’d handle this by implementing a middleware… Can have a PR up in the next 24 hours. I’ve built similar endpoints for multiple production-level applications…”
That was my first external contributor.
I’m still pinching myself.
This whole project started over two years ago as a full auth app, evolved through an SDK and the Identity Engine, and finally became the CLI I built entirely on my Android phone after my laptop died and I quit retail to go full-time.
Every single run still gives me a little notification, and seeing real people actually using it (and now contributing to it) keeps me going.
What changed in the last 48 hours:
• Added full SECURITY.md + private vulnerability reporting
• Enabled GitHub Sponsors (the button is now live)
Created realistic good-first-issues so others can jump in
First community PR is coming in the next day
If you tried the CLI after my last post , thank you.
If you haven’t yet, here’s the one-command way:
npx create-authenik8-app my-app
Repo: https://github.com/COD434/create-authenik8-app
Example generated app: https://github.com/COD434/create-authenik8-app-example
Discussions (come say hi): https://github.com/COD434/create-authenik8-app/discussions
There are still open good-first-issues if you want to be the second contributor 😉
Would love to hear what you think , drop a comment below with any feedback, what’s missing, or what you built with it.
This phone-built project is just getting started.
— Karabo (COD434)
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