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st

Introduction

What st is and how it is put together.

A command line for Steam.

st is a single binary. It speaks to Steam over plain HTTPS, shapes the responses into clean records, and gets out of your way. There is no API key and no login: every surface it reads is public.

One keyless plane, three hosts

st reads one keyless plane spread across three hosts, all keyed by the numeric appid:

  • The store (store.steampowered.com) answers app details, store search, user reviews, package details, and the featured lists as JSON. st app also folds in the two structured islands the store page carries that the JSON omits: the schema.org rating and the user tag list.
  • The keyless subset of the web API (api.steampowered.com) answers a game's news, its live concurrent player count, and its global achievement unlock rates.
  • The community site (steamcommunity.com) serves public profiles as XML and the community market as JSON.

Because the appid keys the store entry, its reviews, its news, its player count, and its achievements, every record links into one graph. A search hit points at an app, an app points at its DLC, demos, packages, reviews, and news, a review points at its author's profile, and a profile points at its most-played apps. browse pages the whole catalog as the discovery seed, and crawl walks those typed edges breadth-first from any app, package, or profile.

How it is built

  • A library package (steam) holds the HTTP client and the typed data models. It paces requests, sets an honest User-Agent, and retries the transient failures any public site throws under load.
  • A domain (steam/domain.go) declares each operation once on the any-cli/kit framework. That single declaration becomes a CLI command, an HTTP route, an MCP tool, and a resource-URI dereference. It is the one place you add to the tool.
  • A thin cmd/st hands the assembled app to kit.Run, which builds the command tree and the serve and mcp surfaces.

One operation, four surfaces

Because an operation is surface-neutral, the same app you run on the command line is also a route and a tool:

st app 620                      # the command
st serve --addr :7777           # GET /v1/app/620
st mcp                          # the app tool, over stdio
ant get steam://app/620         # the URI dereference (via a host)

You write the fetch and the record shape; the surfaces come for free.

Scope

st is a read-only client over data Steam already serves publicly. It does not log in, store credentials, or solve anti-bot challenges, and it is honest about a walled surface rather than working around it. That narrow scope keeps it a single small binary with no database, no daemon, and no setup.

Next: install it, then take the quick start.

3 min read