Cavalry Control

Cavalry (/Applications/Cavalry.app) is scriptable in JavaScript (V8 12.4 since 2.6, so ES2024 — let/const, arrow functions, Set methods all work; api.* / ui.* / cavalry.* modules). Drive it through the Cavalry Bridge — a small script UI running inside Cavalry that executes whatever is POSTed to 127.0.0.1:8731. Everything below was proven against Cavalry 2.7.2 (May 2026, the current release) on real projects; the reference file covers the rest of the API surface.

Since 2.7 Cavalry belongs to Canva: sign-in uses a Canva account and the former Professional features are free for everyone — so don't plan around licence tiers. The one casualty is the CLI, which is not shipped in 2.7.x (see Rendering).

• references/api-reference.md — condensed module reference (api, cavalry, ui, WebClient/WebServer, render scripts, CLI). Read it when you need something outside the cheatsheet below.
• references/cavalry-types/ — the complete API as vendored TypeScript definitions with JSDoc examples; grep it for any function the reference doesn't cover.
• scripts/cavalry-bridge.js — the bridge to install into Cavalry.
• scripts/cavalry-helpers.js — setAttrs/keyAttrs (set and keyframe that fail loudly instead of silently), newComp/useComp/findComp, splitLetters (per-letter text), renderFrames, writeJSON. Pull it in with api.load("<abs path>/scripts/cavalry-helpers.js") at the top of each build script.
• scripts/cavalry-send.sh — send a JS file (or -c 'inline code') to the bridge and wait for completion; exits non-zero and prints the JS error on failure. --ping checks the bridge is reachable and reports the bridge and Cavalry versions.