Utility Commands

Beyond the core release workflow, Cursus provides a few utility commands for setup and quality enforcement.

cursus init

Initialises a new Cursus configuration in your repository:

cursus init

This runs an interactive TUI wizard that asks which package managers you use and writes a .cursus/config.toml with sensible defaults. It also creates the .cursus/ directory if it doesn’t already exist.

init is interactive-only. Projects that need to generate config programmatically can write .cursus/config.toml directly — see the configuration reference for the full schema.

cursus verify

Checks that the current branch has at least one new changeset relative to a base ref:

cursus verify --no-interactive

Exit codes:

Code	Meaning
0	At least one changeset found
1	Error
2	No changesets found

By default the base ref is origin/HEAD. Override it with --base:

cursus verify --no-interactive --base origin/main

Enforcing changesets on pull requests

verify is designed to be used as a CI gate so that every PR that touches releasable code includes a changeset. Add it as a required status check:

name: CI
on:
  pull_request:

jobs:
  verify-changeset:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v6
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - run: cursus verify --no-interactive

The fetch-depth: 0 is important — a shallow clone won’t have the history needed to compare against the base ref.

Note that PRs which use --auto to derive their changeset automatically (e.g. dependency update PRs) will satisfy this check without any manual intervention. See Automating dependency update changesets.