How to Create an App

The first stage in building an application with BladeRunnerJS (BRJS) is to scaffold the skeleton (default structure) for an application

There are two ways to create an app

• Via the Command Line Interface (CLI) or

• Via the Web dashboard

We will go through both these ways below. Remember, you only need to follow one of the options as they both achieve the same thing.

Option 1. Creating an app using the CLI

You can create an App as follows:

$ ./brjs create-app <app-name> [<require-prefix>]

• app-name is the name of the application you want to create. A directory will be created in BRJS_HOME/brjs-apps with this name.
• require-prefix is an optional parameter for the prefix to be used in require statements when referencing JavaScript modules.

Example

Executing the following will create a new application called brjstodo within the BRJS_HOME/brjs-apps directory.

./brjs create-app brjstodo

Option 2. Creating an app using the web dashboard

You can create an app from the web dashboard by starting the BRJS development server:

./brjs serve

And navigating to http://localhost:7070. From there click the New App button and follow the instructions.

Example

Click the button ‘New App’

This brings up the a window which prompts you enter an app name and namespace:

Note: this will change to require prefix in the future

Enter the App Name ‘brjstodo’ and App Namespace ‘brjs todo’ and click ‘Create’.

You’ll see that an app icon has now been added to the dashboard.

You can click on this icon to open it. However, as there are no bladesets yet created there is nothing displayed at the moment. Once you start creating bladesets, there will be more to see here.

Results

Whichever method you use to create your new app, you will see that your new app automatically contains multiple directories including libraries. In the aspect directory you'll find an index.html entry point a src directory for your JavaScript, a themes directory for your CSS and images, and a resources directory for everything else.

You can view this aspect by starting the BRJS development server (if you haven't done so already) and navigating to http://localhost:7070/brjstodo.

Where next?

• Now that you have created an app, the next thing to do is to create a bladeset
• Once you have a bladeset, you will be able to start creating blades.
• You may also want to create multiple aspects for your app instead of using the default aspect you have just created. Details on how to do this on the Create an Aspect page.