Creating your new project

Adapt projects

In Adapt, a project is simply a directory that contains one or more Adapt specifications. The project directory should be treated just like any other code you write, so should typically be in a version control system such as git. For many apps, it's easiest to simply create a subdirectory for the Adapt project alongside the source code for the app that Adapt will be managing.

Start with a starter

The easiest way to create an Adapt project is to use an Adapt starter. A starter is essentially a template for an entire app that also includes the Adapt project needed to deploy, test, and manage that app.

Starters are especially helpful if you're creating a brand new app from scratch, like we are here.

For this tutorial, we've chosen to build an app that's a Node.js REST API server. So we'll use the hello-node starter, which will give us the complete framework for a Node.js HTTP server app that responds with "Hello World!".

Let's go ahead and create our new app:

adapt new hello-node ./tutorial

You should now see a new directory called tutorial, which contains:

• deploy

  This is the Adapt project directory. We'll take a closer look at this directory throughout the tutorial.

• backend

  This is the directory that contains the source code for the Node.js HTTP server app. Again, don't worry if you're not familiar with Node.js. You can think of this as the app source code you would write, in your language of choice.

Other starters

More starters for different types of apps are available in the Adapt starter library on GitLab.

To use a starter from the library, just use the name and give it a path to a directory to create, like this:

adapt new hello-react-node-postgres ./myapp

Or for any other starter, you can specify it using a URL, a published NPM package reference, or any of the other ways to specify an NPM dependency:

adapt new git+https://github.com/myusername/mystarterrepo

Available starters include:

• hello-react-node-postgres

  A Hello World starter that includes a React user interface (made with create-react-app), a Node.js API back end, a Postgres database, a static web server, and a URL router.

• hello-node

  A Hello World starter that just includes a Node.js API back end.

• moviedb-react-node

  A complete MovieDB app with a React UI that lets you search for movies via a Node.js REST API and Postgres database.

• blank

  A minimal starting point for creating an Adapt-enabled project.

Next step

Next we'll cover how to describe your app in an Adapt spec.