xyzzy

What is xyzzy and what is it for?

xyzzy is a Holochain project template — a starting codebase that a developer copies to begin their own Holochain application instead of assembling the groundwork themselves. It exists to make that first step fast, handing a new project a working structure, an initialization script and placeholder names that are replaced with the new project's own.

xyzzy is a Holochain project template, published under the lightningrodlabs GitHub account. Its README describes it as a template for rapidly starting Holochain projects: instead of building a Holochain application's structure from nothing, a developer begins from a copy of xyzzy that already carries a working layout, tooling and sample code. It is a starting point for building software, not an application that someone installs and uses.

In practice the template works as a mould. A developer clones the repository, renames the folder to the name of the new project and runs the initialization script inside it. The script takes the folder name as the project's name and asks for a primary data type; it then replaces the template's placeholder names throughout the files and renames files, so the result reads as the new project rather than as xyzzy.

The scaffold mixes Rust with web front-end sources in TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, Shell and Nix, so a new project starts with back-end code alongside a web interface to build on. The repository README at github.com/lightningrodlabs/xyzzy is where the exact steps live: its example initializes a project named after its folder and answers the data-type prompt with a 'Post'.

From 2 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.