Initialise a project

To launch an Elara solution on Elara platform, you deploy a template. A project is the development workspace where you develop a solution template, and consists of all files used to describe the template.

In this tutorial, you will initialise a project on your machine in preparation for development of a template.

Initalise a project using the EDK CLI

Each project must be in it's own working directory. Using the command-line, create a new directory in your desired location on your machine, and navigate to it.

The edk project init command in the EDK CLI allows you to initialise a project. You can get help with usage of the command by running edk project init --help in the command-line.

edk project init

You will see the following output as a result:

ℹ package.json installed, run `npm install`
✔ init succeeeded

The edk project init command creates a series of files within your project working directory, which is organised in the following directory structure:

my-project
  ├── project.json
  ├── tsconfig.json
  └── package.json

Each of these items forms the skeleton of a project, and each plays an important part in the Elara development process. The purpose of each is described below:

project.json

At a high level, the project.json in a project is a JSON file which acts as a manifest for the project, and is involved in the launch process for Elara solutions. The edk project init command creates a skeleton project.json in the project working directory. You can see the format of your skeleton project.json below:

{
  "name": "my-project",
  "assets": {}
}

In Elara development, you define Templates using the

TypeScript programming language, within .ts TypeScript files (you will learn this process in upcoming lessons). The assets field in a project.json catalogues these file assets. The edk project init command does not create any assets , so the assets collection is empty upon initialisation.

package.json

The edk project init command initialises a project as a Node.js package that is installable via NPM, and so creates a basic skeleton package.json within the project working directory. You can see the format of your skeleton package.json below:

{
  "name": "my_project",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "",
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/node": "^20.0.0",
    "typescript": "~5.3.3"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "@elaraai/core": "^5.0.0"
  }
}

The skeleton package.json file defines the default project dependencies (Node.js, TypeScript and EDK Core) and their versions. The important package to recognise is EDK Core. EDK Core is a library of features that you use to build Templates, and you will use the EDK Core library in upcoming lessons. package.json is also a useful location where, in future Projects, you may want to record meta-data about your Elara project, such as the repository location, author name, licence details and version of the project. For a deeper understanding of package.json and it's configuration settings, see the

NPM package.json documentation.

tsconfig.json

The edk project init command creates a basic skeleton tsconfig.json, which contains a basic configuration of TypeScript compiler options.

In your future Projects, you may want to change these compiler options. For a deeper understanding of tsconfig/json and it's configuration settings, see the

TypeScript tsconfig.json documentation.

Install the project dependencies

Finally, run npm install to install the node package dependencies for your project.

The npm install command installs all package dependencies from your package.json within a local node_modules directory in your project working directory. It also creates a package-lock.json file, which describes the package dependency tree for the installation.

You do not need a detailed understanding of NPM to develop a template. If you would like a detailed understanding, refer to the

NPM documentation.

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Next steps

In this tutorial you initialised a project and set up the project dependencies. Continue to the next tutorial to review the prequisite TypeScript knowledge needed for development in Elara.