Installation and Configuration

There are three key steps for starting development on platformOS:

• signing up on the Partner Portal,
• creating an instance
• installing the platformOS command line interface.

Sign up on the Partner Portal

The Partner Portal is an online interface, where you can create, manage, and configure your sites.

To interact with platformOS you will need to have an account, so the very first thing you need to do is register on the Partner Portal.

Make sure that you’ll verify your account by following the instructions you’ll find in the email we send you after the registration.

Create an instance

In order to begin working with platformOS, you need to create an instance where you will be running your code and storing files.

In order to create a new instance you need to be logged in the Partner Portal and in the left navigation you’ll find a Create Instance link.

The Instance name can be any name of your choice. The only other options you’ll need to choose are the Data Center and Billing plan. For the needs of this guide we can use the Staging environment, which is a completely free environment designed for testing and developement.

Choosing the Staging data center and clicking on the Staging Unbilled plan should be enough for you to create your first instance.

On the list of instances, you may initially see your instance marked with the SCHEDULED_TO_ACTIVATE status. This process usually takes only a couple of seconds.

After a short while, you should see the status changed to Active when you refresh the page. This means that you can go to the instance URL visible in the list and check if it's working. This URL is important: you’ll see all the code changes here.

Install pos-cli

The platformOS command line interface – or pos-cli – is a tool that will allow you to interact with your instance.

The pos-cli offers a variety of options that you can explore in later sections of this guide, or you can jump right in to the pos-cli documentation.

To install the pos-cli you’ll need a recent version of NPM (Node Package Manager) installed on your system. NPM is distributed with Node.js, so we recommend you follow the official guide for installing Node.js and NPM. If you get lost there, it might be the easiest to use the node.js installer that will look just like installing any other program on your system.

Once you have Node.js installed, start your command-line tool of choice and run the following:

npm install -g @platformos/pos-cli

The -g attribute means you are installing the tool globally. That might require having higher system permissions. On unix-based systems that means using sudo and on Windows it might require running your command-line tool with the administrative rights (it should be available in the right-click context menu).

sudo npm install -g @platformos/pos-cli

After installing the pos-cli you should be able to test if everything ran successfully with the following command:

pos-cli -v

If everything went smoothly, the version number of the pos-cli tool that you’ve just installed is displayed (for example: 4.7.1).