Build Your First App

Building an application might be the best way to learn all of the core aspects of developing on platformOS.

This tutorial will guide you through the steps of creating a very simple To Do List app. It explains how to build a layout using Liquid, how to build the structure of a database using YAML, and then how to use it for saving and loading data with the help of GraphQL. During this tutorial you will also have a chance to take a look at the basic workflow that you can later use for your everyday work.

Functionalities a To Do app needs

The first task is to figure out what core functions you would like to implement. A To Do application is basically just a simple list of items. So you would like to be able to:

• View the list if there are any items on it.
• Add a new item to the list.
• Mark an item as done which would remove it from the list.

What do you need to know to start?

In this tutorial, we assume that you’ve followed our Get Started tutorial, so you have your development environment set up. We require you to understand HTML as we won’t be explaining that part of the code at all. We will also be using a little bit of CSS to add some styling to our app, but we will keep it very basic, and you will be able to copy it, if the design aspect of building apps is not your area of expertise.

This tutorial is not about explaining any language’s syntax. We will be using GraphQL and explaining what a particular code fragment does, but for the deeper understanding of a given language we recommend you look at its documentation. Still, it might be a good way to learn the syntax by using the language so you will do just fine even if you don’t yet know any of it.

To sum it up: the very first thing you will need is your own platformOS instance, pos-cli installed and configured and a folder for your project with the proper folder structure.

Get the final source code

If you’d like to check out the final source code, we published it on GitHub. You can clone the repository and deploy it to your own instance anytime.

The application is deployed on our test environment if you’d like to take a look.