Your first machine

Three commands, and the first one is the check you just ran.

talea doctor                 # git, SSH and GitHub auth all reachable?
talea init ~/Workspace       # discover, ask what to keep, fill the tree
talea manifest push          # publish the catalogue for the next machine

What init actually does

1. Creates the workspace

   ~/Workspace by default, or whatever directory you name. It records this machine’s preferences — the root, the protocol — in <workspace>/.talea.json.

2. Builds the catalogue, if there isn’t one

   The packaged catalogue ships empty, on purpose: talea is the machinery, not a list of anybody’s repositories. So on a first machine init runs talea discover for you.

   Discovery reads your own repos, every organisation you belong to, and anything shared with you directly — affiliation=owner,organization_member,collaborator, which reaches further than gh repo list does. For each repo it records the owner, the default branch, whether it is a fork and when it was last pushed to.

   It lands in ~/.talea/talea.repos.json. That file is yours and it travels.

3. Asks what this machine should keep

   Your default set, or a checklist of everything in the catalogue with those defaults already ticked. Space toggles, Enter saves, Esc cancels and changes nothing.

   The answer goes in <workspace>/.talea.json and never leaves this machine.

4. Fills the tree

   Existing checkouts are found and moved into place first; only what is genuinely missing is cloned. Adopting what you have is that half in full.

Publishing the catalogue

talea manifest push

That writes the catalogue to a private gist and prints its id. Every later push and pull from this machine needs no argument — the id is remembered in ~/.talea/state.json.

Caution

The gist is private, but it still holds the names of your private repositories. Treat the id like a bookmark you would not paste into a public channel.

Useful flags on init

Flag	For
--no-clone	Write the config now, fill the tree later
--pick	Go straight to the checklist, skipping the defaults offer
--protocol https	Clone over HTTPS instead of SSH
-g <group>	Restrict the whole run to one group
-j <n>	How many git operations run at once (default: one per core, clamped to 6–12)

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Next: Every machine after that.