First CLI release for Local Iterations

It's with immense excitement that we write our first blog post announcing the first release of the Celest CLI, enabling you to experience Celest and build a backend locally! But today is not just about introducing our product—it’s about sharing our dream and vision with the community that we cherish deeply.

Celest is a backend-as-a-service that enables Flutter developers to build their backends in Dart, without any additional tooling. With this release, we are making our CLI and Celest Functions available to you to build and experiment with locally. In response to the excited reaction we’ve received from the Flutter community, we chose to release this version now so that we can give you a taste of the Celest experience and get your feedback early.

Check out our video that walks you through the Celest experience!

Why use Celest?

Celest and its Functions offering enable you to write custom business logic in Dart that runs in the cloud. Celest Functions is the first "Cloud Widget" we are introducing to help bridge the gap of building backend components completely in Dart. Since Celest Functions are just Dart functions, they enable you to reuse code between your Flutter app and your backend with full type safety between the two. All of the third-party packages you're familiar with from the Dart ecosystem can now be used in your backend.

With Celest Functions and the CLI, you get a type-safe API layer between your business logic in the cloud and the UI of your Flutter app. When developing locally, your changes are available instantly via our hot-reload mechanism. This makes it easier to iterate quickly while adding features to your backend and ship to your customers fast.

In future releases, Celest will handle the deployment and management of your functions' underlying infrastructure.

What's next for Celest?

We can't wait to share more updates and continue building Celest with you. We’re on this adventure together. Your thoughts, feedback, and ideas are what will shape Celest’s future the most.

Our next action items are creating a public roadmap, RFCs for Authorization and Real-Time Patterns, and enabling cloud deployments for all Celest users.

Visit our documentation to learn more about this new release and to get started with the CLI and Celest Functions. Join our Discord server to give us feedback about your experience with this or future releases and connect with other Flutter and Dart enthusiasts. And let us know on GitHub (opens in a new tab) if there are any features you'd like to see or if you get stuck at any point.