You are on a fresh macOS account. By the end of this page you have the kit cloned, the profile written to ~/.creator-kit/profile, and ck doctor returning 11 of 11 PASS. After that, switch to the first-hour runbook — that is the canonical path from doctor-passing to a live published surface.
Prerequisites
- macOS 14 or later. Apple Silicon validated; Intel may work but is not validated.
- Tailscale connected. Several internal probes (notably
ck doctor) assume the tailnet is up. - Cloudflared installed (
brew install cloudflared). The publish step uses it; the bootstrap step does not. ghauthenticated against thecandlefish-aiorg. If not, rungh auth login --webafter the bootstrap step.
The three commands
git clone git@github.com:candlefish-ai/creator-kit.git ~/Work/creator-kit
cd ~/Work/creator-kit
./bootstrap.sh --user <your-name> --email <your-email@candlefish.ai>
./bin/ck doctorWhat each command does:
git clone— pulls the kit from the canonicalcandlefish-ai/creator-kitrepository into~/Work/creator-kit.bootstrap.sh— installs Homebrew packages idempotently, writes~/.creator-kit/profile(mode 600) with your name and email, sets your global git author identity from the profile, and runsmake installto symlink the kit’s seven hooks and three agents into~/.claude/.ck doctor— eleven preflight checks: CLI presence (claude, codex, cloudflared, jq, uv, fswatch, gh authenticated), profile integrity (mode 600, user and email keys), git author email matches profile, thecreator-devagent is symlinked into~/.claude/agents/, andfonts.candlefish.aireturns 200.
Expected end state: ck doctor exits 0 with ck doctor: all checks passed.
When a check fails
| Check | Most common cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
gh CLI authenticated | No GitHub token cached | gh auth login --web, then re-run ck doctor |
creator-kit profile | Bootstrap was interrupted | Re-run ./bootstrap.sh --user <name> --email <email> |
git author email matches profile | Per-repo override not yet set | git config user.email <email-from-profile>; the profile’s value is authoritative |
creator-dev agent installed | make install did not run | Run make install from the kit root |
fonts.candlefish.ai reachable | Worker is down or your origin is not allowlisted | Page works without it (system monospace fallback). See the publishing runbook for allowlist details. |
What the kit does NOT do at quickstart time
- Provision DNS for any surface. The first-hour runbook covers
cloudflared tunnel route dns. - Generate Basic Auth secrets. Each project’s secret lives at
~/.config/<slug>.env, mode 600. - Write to
~/Library/LaunchAgents/. That happens atck publish --executetime, not at bootstrap.
Next
The first-hour runbook walks the full path from doctor-passing through ck new and ck publish --execute to a live *.highline.work surface. Read it next.