claude-starter

A tiny, public, zero-friction onboarding helper for Claude Code.

Install it once on any machine, and from then on, whenever you start a Claude Code session in a project that has no CLAUDE.md, Claude offers to pull this starter template and scaffold the project for you (detect the stack, draft a CLAUDE.md, optionally add a project doctor).

Install (any machine)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kthistlewood/claude-starter/main/install.sh | bash

No auth needed (this repo is public). It:

• clones this repo to ~/.claude/starter,
• symlinks commands/setup.md (the /setup command) and hooks/onboard-check.sh into ~/.claude,
• merges a SessionStart hook into ~/.claude/settings.json (backing it up first).

Re-run any time to update (it git pulls). Requires git and python3 (both are standard on a Claude Code dev machine).

What you get

• /setup — run it in any project to onboard it: detect the stack, check for missing tools, scaffold a CLAUDE.md from template/, optionally add a scripts/doctor.sh, and suggest conventions. Confirms before writing anything.
• An un-onboarded-project nudge — a SessionStart hook that, the first time you open a project with no CLAUDE.md, offers /setup. Silent on onboarded projects and after the first nudge per project. Never blocks a session.

Contents

• install.sh — the one-line installer above.
• commands/setup.md — the /setup onboarding command.
• hooks/onboard-check.sh — the global SessionStart nudge.
• template/CLAUDE.md — the starter CLAUDE.md that /setup fills in.
• template/doctor.sh — a starter project preflight script.

Uninstall

rm -f ~/.claude/commands/setup.md ~/.claude/hooks/onboard-check.sh
rm -rf ~/.claude/starter ~/.claude/onboard-seen
# then remove the onboard-check.sh entry from ~/.claude/settings.json (a .bak is alongside it)