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Setup

In the following steps you will setup Slicknode on your computer.

Instructions

First you need to install the Slicknode CLI. The Slicknode CLI is available via NPM and should be installed globally:

npm install -g slicknode@latest

Afterwards, test the installation by running the following command in your terminal:

slicknode --version

This should print the currently installed version number of slicknode (for example 0.13.0).

Exploring the Slicknode CLI

The Slicknode CLI commands can be explored interactively.

To list all available commands with descriptions, run this command:

slicknode

To get help and available options for a specific command, use the following:

slicknode help <commandname>

Here you would replace <commandname> with the command you want to inspect. For example to get available options and arguments for the init command, we can use this:

slicknode help init

This works for every command and is automatically updated whenever new functionality is added to Slicknode.

Project Setup

Now you can create a new project on your computer. Navigate to the folder in which you want to create the new project, then initialize it:

slicknode init tutorial-project

Info

When you execute this for the first time, it will open a browser window and ask you to give your computer access to your Slicknode account. You can login with your Github account, your Slicknode credentials or create a new account.

The command creates a new folder with the name my-project and adds the essential files for a Slicknode project. Afterwards change into the newly created project directory:

cd ./tutorial-project

Info

For all the project specific commands that we are using in the next steps, slicknode by default assumes to apply the command to the project in the current directory.

Explanations

If you open the project folder in your favorite IDE, you should see the following files and folders:

.slicknode/
slicknode.yml
.slicknoderc

slicknode.yml

The slicknode.yml in the root directory of your project serves as the entry point to your application. This is the place where the dependencies (modules) of your project are defined. This includes dependencies to built-in modules as well as dependencies to custom modules that we are about to create for your blog. You should not edit this file manually, but rather use the Slicknode CLI commands to install and remove modules.

The content of a fresh slicknode.yml file looks something like this:

dependencies:
  auth: latest
  core: latest
  relay: latest

.slicknoderc

The .slicknoderc file serves as a store for all the active deployments of the project in the Slicknode Cloud. It is a JSON object where the keys are the name of the environment (for example prod, develop, stage) and the configuration itself holds information about the project, like the ID, the current version etc.

This file should not be edited manually. You should always use the Slicknode CLI commands to create or delete new environments.

Whenever you create a new project, Slicknode automatically creates a default environment. This environment is used whenever you execute a command without the --env option. Therefore it is recommended to use the default environment as your development branch, so that you don't accidentally deploy unwanted changes to production.

You can later always create more environments for staging, production etc. For now, we just use the default environment.

.slicknode Folder

The folder .slicknode stores cached files to optimize the performance and should not be edited manually. This folder can also be safely added to your .gitignore since it only holds data that can be derived from the project configuration.