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Step 1: Create a project workspace

Open a shell. Check the version of node to ensure that you're using at least 14.18.0:

node --version

Change to the directory where you want to create the project. Run the following command:

npx create-chiselstrike-app@0.15.0 my-backend
tip

Throughout ChiselStrike documentation you can copy a code sample by clicking the copy icon as you hover the mouse over the sample.

my-backend is the name of directory that will be created in the current directory. You will see output that looks similar to this:

Creating a new ChiselStrike project in /your/path/my-backend ...
Installing packages. This might take a couple of minutes.

added 27 packages, and audited 28 packages in 7s

3 packages are looking for funding
  run `npm fund` for details

found 0 vulnerabilities

The command will create a project structure like this:

my-backend
├── Chisel.toml
├── Dockerfile
├── README.md
├── events
├── models
├── node_modules
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
├── policies
├── routes
│   └── hello.ts
└── tsconfig.json

Take a quick look at the parts of the project that are not standard nodejs:

  • Chisel.toml: This file contains the ChiselStrike configuration. For this tutorial, you will not modify this file.
  • events, models, policies, routes: ChiselStrike uses the code in these directories for your backend. You will populate these folders with code for ChiselStrike to run.
  • tsconfig.json: This file contains the project's TypeScript configuration. For this tutorial, you will not modify this file.

Open package.json and you will see that two ChiselStrike dependencies and two scripts are already added to the project.

package.json
    "scripts": {
        "dev": "chisel dev",
        "type-check": "tsc"
    },
    "dependencies": {
        "@chiselstrike/api": "0.15.0",
    },
    "devDependencies": {
        "@chiselstrike/cli": "0.15.0"
    }
  • @chiselstrike/cli provides the ChiselStrike CLI used during development. Its most important feature is chiseld, the ChiselStrike server.
  • @chiselstrike/api provides the runtime API for interacting programmatically with chiseld in your project.