How to provision your full dev stack from the command line

A database, hosting, auth, and monitoring—provisioned, credentials wired, and ready to use—in about ten minutes. Here's exactly how.

There's a specific kind of friction that kills side projects before they ship: the infrastructure setup loop.

You know it. You create a new repo, open your editor, write three lines of code—and then spend the next two hours creating accounts, navigating dashboards, generating API keys, copying connection strings into .env files, and realizing you got the variable name wrong. By the time you're actually building, you've lost the thread.

This post is about skipping that. Specifically, how to go from an empty directory to a fully provisioned dev stack—Postgres database, hosted deployment, auth provider, error monitoring—using the Stripe CLI, without touching a single dashboard.

What you'll end up with

By the end of this guide, you'll have:

A Postgres database (Neon), live and connected
A hosting deployment (Vercel), wired to your repo
Auth (Clerk), configured and credential-synced
Error monitoring (Sentry), capturing exceptions from day one
A .env file with every credential in it, ready to use
All of it billed through Stripe—one payment method on file, spend across every provider visible in one place

Time to complete: roughly 10 minutes, mostly waiting for services to provision.

Prerequisites

You'll need the Stripe CLI and the Projects plugin:

# Install the Stripe CLI
brew install stripe/stripe-cli/stripe

# Install the Projects plugin
stripe plugin install projects

stripe login

If you don't have a Stripe account, you can create one at dashboard.stripe.com. You won't need to enable payments—Projects works independently of your payment integration.

Step 1: Initialize your project

Navigate to your project directory—or create a new one—and initialize it:

mkdir my-app && cd my-app
stripe projects init

This creates a lightweight project manifest that tracks which services are attached to this directory. It's the anchor for everything that follows.

Step 2: Provision a database

Add a Postgres database from Neon:

stripe projects add neon/postgres

What's happening behind the scenes: Stripe Projects calls the Neon API, creates a real Neon project in your account, generates a connection string, and writes it to your local project vault and .env file.

You'll see something like:

✓ Created neon/postgres
  DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@ep-cool-name-123.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require
  Written to .env

That's a live, accessible database. Open your app and start connecting to it.

Prefer Supabase? The command is the same pattern:

stripe projects add supabase/postgres

Or if you want a lightweight edge database:

stripe projects add turso/database

You can also add a Redis-compatible cache (useful for sessions, queues, rate limiting):

stripe projects add upstash/redis

Step 3: Set up hosting

Add a Vercel project:

stripe projects add vercel/project

This creates a Vercel project linked to your Stripe account. Credentials and project identifiers are written to your .env. When you're ready to deploy, connect your repo in the Vercel dashboard—your environment variables will already be there.

Prefer a different host? Stripe Projects covers several:

stripe projects add netlify/site     # Netlify
stripe projects add railway/project  # Railway
stripe projects add render/service   # Render
stripe projects add fly/app          # Fly.io

Pick the one that fits your stack. They all follow the same pattern: one command, credentials in .env.

Step 4: Add auth

Authentication is one of the highest-effort parts of a new stack. Add Clerk:

stripe projects add clerk/auth

You'll get your Clerk publishable key and secret key written to .env as NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY and CLERK_SECRET_KEY (or the equivalent for your framework). No Clerk dashboard setup required to get started.

If you're using WorkOS instead (common for B2B products):

stripe projects add workos/auth

Step 5: Set up error monitoring

Add Sentry before you ship, not after your first incident:

stripe projects add sentry/monitor

Your SENTRY_DSN and SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN are written to .env. Initialize the Sentry SDK in your app and exceptions will start flowing immediately.

Step 6: Sync your environment

If you've run multiple projects add commands, pull all credentials into a single .env file:

stripe projects env --pull

Your .env now looks something like:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://...
NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=pk_live_...
CLERK_SECRET_KEY=sk_live_...
SENTRY_DSN=https://...@sentry.io/...
VERCEL_PROJECT_ID=prj_...
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=https://...
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN=...

Every variable is real. Every service is live. You didn't navigate a single dashboard.

A note on credentials

Stripe Projects writes your credentials to a local vault in addition to .env. This means you can repull your .env at any time with stripe projects env --pull, even if you delete the file. It also means you should treat your vault like you treat your other secrets—don't commit it to source control.

Add .env to your .gitignore if you haven't already:

echo ".env" >> .gitignore

When you're ready to set up a staging environment, Projects supports named environments with their own isolated credential sets:

stripe projects env create staging --output .env.staging

This provisions a fresh set of credentials for each service—a separate Neon database, a separate Sentry project, and so on—written to .env.staging. Your local dev environment and your staging environment stay cleanly separated, with no manual credential juggling required.

What your stack looks like

Five commands (plus the initial setup) got you here:

stripe projects init
stripe projects add neon/postgres
stripe projects add vercel/project
stripe projects add clerk/auth
stripe projects add sentry/monitor
stripe projects env --pull

You have a full production-capable dev stack. The services are real—not sandboxed, not simulated. You can start writing application code immediately.

All five providers run their billing through Stripe. One payment method, and you can monitor and manage spend across all of them from a single place.

What to add next

Stripe Projects has 33 providers across every category you'll need. Common additions at this point:

AI inference: stripe projects add openrouter/ai — OpenRouter gives you access to every major model (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and more) with a single API key. Your OPENROUTER_API_KEY is in .env in seconds.

Analytics: stripe projects add posthog/analytics or stripe projects add mixpanel/analytics

Background jobs: stripe projects add inngest/functions

Transactional email: stripe projects add agentmail/email

Vector database (for RAG): stripe projects add chroma/database

The full catalog is at projects.dev/providers. All of them follow the same pattern. Add what you need, when you need it.

For coding agents

If you're working with a coding agent—Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot Workspace, Codex—Stripe Projects is designed to be invoked non-interactively. That means your agent can run stripe projects add as part of its build loop, provision the services it needs, and get structured credentials back without opening a browser or waiting on a human to copy-paste an API key.

To enable agent access, run:

stripe projects agent init

This generates an agent skill file that scopes what your coding agent is allowed to provision. You stay in control of what's permitted; the agent handles the execution.

See the agent setup guide for a full walkthrough.

Wrapping up

Provisioning a dev stack used to mean an afternoon of dashboard work before you could write a line of application code. It doesn't have to.

Stripe Projects gives you a CLI catalog of every service you're likely to need, provisions real instances with a single command, and handles the credential management automatically. The goal is simple: more time building, less time configuring.

stripe plugin install projects

Browse the full provider catalog, or follow the quickstart to get your first service running in under two minutes.