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Get Started — Introduction

Last edit: Jun 06, 2024

Welcome to platformOS! Our Get Started guides will walk you through the steps of building a sample site or app on platformOS. They include detailed explanations for each step, example code, tips and best practices on development workflow and QA, and links to learn more.

What you need to know

Besides standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, platformOS uses a couple of languages and technologies that you need to be familiar with to build a site on our platform.

Command line knowledge is required to navigate through the project folder structure and to deploy the changes you make locally to the server.

We recommend using a version control system. Internally, we use GitHub to host and collaborate on our git repositories. You can choose other version control systems, or decide to go without any: all that is required is your codebase and an Instance you can sync/deploy to.

GraphQL is a query language that will help you build your back-end and needed APIs. It allows to manage data for your application, store and read database records and more. In the Get Started guide you will be guided through writing your first queries, so don’t worry!

Liquid is a template language that allows you to build dynamic pages and provide dynamic configuration. In the Get Started guide we will be using it to server-side render data and to manage how the page behaves depending on user's action. You can check out the following articles but you can also learn while doing – it should be simple to understand.

YAML allows you to store complex data in a human-readable format. We will be using it for building our databases, set some simple configuration, and optionally to store the translation strings for multilanguage webstites.

Not sure where to start?

Let’s build a simple website together! If you are new to platformOS, we propose that you start with a simple course that we’ve prepared.

You will learn how to set up your environment, get a starter codebase, and deploy everything to your platfromOS instance. Next, you’ll build a simple to-do app using all of the core platformOS concepts.

Ready? Let’s learn how to install and configure your development environment.

Note

The shortened version of this guide is available as an interactive tutorial at Try Now

Quick start

  1. Go to the Partner Portal and sign up
  2. Create new instance in the Partner Portal
  3. Install pos-cli
    platformOS command-line interface is distributed through NPM.

npm install -g @platformos/pos-cli
  
  1. Create an empty folder for your project

mkdir platformos-hello
  
  1. Navigate to the project's folder in the command line

cd platformos-hello
  
  1. Initialize the platformOS directory structure

pos-cli init
  
  1. Authenticate your environment

pos-cli env add <environment> --url <your instance url>
  
  1. Upload your code to the instance

pos-cli deploy <environment>
  
  1. Upload code changes automatically when you save the file

pos-cli sync <environment>
  

Learn the core concepts

Still have questions?

Our community can help! The platformOS community is open to all users to share the experience and knowledge gathered from working on platformOS-specific projects.

Join the platformOS community

Questions?

We are always happy to help with any questions you may have.

contact us