First Project

In this documentation, we will see how to setup your first project with Intent, understand some basic concepts and get it running.

Setup

Language

Intent uses Typescript as it's primary language.

Prerequisites

Make sure that Node.js (version >= 18) is installed on your operating system.

Create a new project

Setting up a new Intent project is quite easy with npm installed. You can run the following command in your terminal to get started.

It will ask you a few questions, you can choose Yes or No as per your requirement.

npm i -g @intentjs/cli
intent new my-project

Once this command has ran, move to the directory new-sample-app and open it inside your fav code editor.

You can read more about the directory structure here.

Configuring the Project

INFO

Intent comes with default configuration with aim to help developers quickly setup the project and start building. You are free to make the changes as per your requirement.

Now when you open the .env inside the project, you will see set of following variables.

DEFAULT_DB=pg
DEFAULT_CACHE=memory
DEFAULT_QUEUE=sync
DEFAULT_STORAGE=local
DEFAULT_MAILER=logger

Let's understand these variables one by one.

DEFAULT_DB=sqlite

Whenever you launch a new project with Intent, it comes with SQLite configured as it's database. This helps you quickly get started.

If you wish to change the database configuration, click here.

DEFAULT_CACHE=memory

memory cache is the local cache, so you can start using Cache in your database without breaking a sweat.

If you wish to configure a different cache for your project, read more.

DEFAULT_QUEUE=sync

sync drivers are just a blank drivers which enable you to use queues in your application quickly. Read more about queues.

DEFAULT_STORAGE=local

Intent comes enabled with local storage by default with the files stored inside storage/uploads directory. Read more about storages.

DEFAULT_MAILER=logger

logger is the default driver of our Mailer, you can change this as per your requirement, to do so visit.

Running it locally

To run the project locally in watch mode, you can simply run the following command in your terminal.

node intent dev

Visit http://localhost:5001, and you should be greeted with a message.

Since, Intent comes with support for console commands as well, it will only be fair to have a look at that as well.

Headover to your terminal, and run the following command.

node intent greet

Horace Slughorn once said -
"It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love"

Voila 🎉 we are done with the project setup.

Formatting & Linting

Intent comes configured with eslint and prettier which you can use to lint and format your code respectively.

To do, you can make use of the following command.

$ npm run lint
$ npm run format

Running in Production

Just like any typescript project, you will need to first build the Intent app, and then start the server. To do so, you can make use of the following commands

$ node intent build
$ node dist/app/main.js