Stacks

Stacks wire Minimal to operate a codebase with specific tools and commands. When you name a stack in your minimal.toml file, build-plane commands like mip run build just work. Also, your tasks inherit these familiar tools and semantics automatically.

Learn more about stacks in the reference section.

Available stacks

The Minimal Public Package Registry ships stacks for most common languages and build systems. The registry is the source of truth; the highlights:

Stack	Detected by	Build command
`go`	`go.mod` + `go.sum`	`go build`
`rust`	`Cargo.toml`	`cargo build --release`
`pnpm`	`pnpm-lock.yaml`	`pnpm install && pnpm build`
`npm`	`package-lock.json`	`npm ci && npm run build`
`bun`	`bun.lock`	`bun install && bun run build`
`deno`	`deno.json`	`deno compile`
`uv`	`uv.lock`, `pyproject.toml`	`uv sync && uv build`
`pip`	`requirements.txt`, `setup.py`	`pip3 install --target ./build .`
`gradle`	`build.gradle`	`gradle build -x test`
`make`	`Makefile`	`./configure && make`
`meson`	`meson.build`	`meson setup && ninja`
`cmake`	`CMakeLists.txt`	`cmake && make`
`zig`	`build.zig`	`zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe`

Using a stack

Stacks are declared in the [stack] section of your minimal.toml file.

[stack]
use = "<stack name>"

Any stack defined in your codebase (or defined in any layer in your software supply chain) can be used.

When a stack is defined, any task inherits the packages and environment the stack declares; the stack also contributes default tasks, such as build.

Declaring additional dependencies

It’s quite common for a specific codebase to need additional dependencies, either during the build (build packages) or on any system the built software runs (runtime packages). Both can be declared in your minimal.toml:

[stack]
use = "..."
build_packages = ["perl"]
runtime_packages = ["openssl"]

Dependencies can also be added automatically with min add --build or min add --runtime (see the min reference).

Automatic initialization

Minimal will auto-detect the stack to use for most languages and package managers. To have the Minimal CLI detect an appropriate stack and pre-fill your codebase’s minimal.toml file, run min init in the root directory.