Hi Community 👋
I've been developing a Fluent-based scoped app on our company instance and honestly — developing in Fluent is a lot of fun. The language itself is clean and modern, and I can see why ServiceNow is pushing this as the future of pro-code development.
But I've hit a practical wall and wanted to check if anyone has found a workaround.
Our situation:
- We don't have NowAssist / AI assistance on our instance
- We don't have source control set up yet, and it's not on the roadmap anytime soon
- I have AI assistance in my VS Code locally (Copilot / Claude etc.) which is genuinely great for Fluent development
What I'm trying to do: I want to pull my existing Fluent app from the instance, develop locally in VS Code (with AI help), and push it back to the instance — all without source control.
In the traditional app world, I used to do this easily with:
- sn-scriptsync — live sync via WebSocket, worked great
- ServiceNow Extension for VS Code — pull/push scripts directly
But from what I understand, both of these don't work for Fluent-based apps, since Fluent compiles to metadata rather than being deployed as raw scripts.
My question: Is it at all possible to:
- Pull a Fluent app from an instance locally (without source control / GitHub)
- Do development in VS Code using Fluent + @Servicenow/sdk
- Push/deploy it back to the instance
I've looked at @Servicenow/sdk and the ServiceNow IDE extension, but all the documented workflows seem to assume you have a Git repo set up. Is there any way to do this without source control, even if it's a workaround?
Would love to hear from anyone who has solved this or found a creative workaround. Thanks!
