Creating your first Application

The setup process of developing an application on Insites consists of the following steps:

• Step 1: Sign up for an Insites Console account
• Step 2: Create an Instance from the Console
• Step 3: Create your codebase
• Step 4: Setup the Insites CLI Tool
• Step 5: Deploy to your instance

Step 1: Sign up for an Insites Console account

You need to sign up for an Insites Console account before you can build on Insites. To sign up for an account:

1. Visit the link to sign up for an Insites Console account: Sign Up.
2. Fill out the form on the signup page, and review and agree to the terms and conditions.
3. Hit the SIGNUP button.
4. Check your email inbox and activate your Insites Console account.

Congratulations! You can now begin building on Insites!

Step 2: Create an Instance from the Console

The Console is your central administration panel where you can create, manage, and configure your instances and applications built on Insites.

A summary of the steps needed to create an Instance on the Console is as follows:

1. Go to Instances from the main menu of your Insites Console account.
2. Click on the CREATE INSTANCE button.
3. Fill out the details.
4. Press CREATE.

Step 3: Create your codebase

Insites is framework agnostic and allows you to build your application in any frontend technology. Some common ones are VueJS, ReactJS and Angular. To correctly communicate with the Insites engine and API, your codebase should be organised into a specific directory structure. To create your codebase in a local environment, follow the steps in the Working with the Code and Files tutorial.

What you’ll need:

• Node.js
• Insites CLI Tool

Step 4: Setup the Insites CLI Tool

The Insites CLI tool is a command line interface that helps you deploy configuration files and assets to your Insites application. It also allows you to use team collaboration tools like Git in your workflow.

You can use Insites CLI to deploy or sync your codebase to the Instance as described in the Working with the Code and Files tutorial.

An overview of the steps needed to install the Insites CLI tool is as follows:

1. Once you have Node.js installed in your machine, open your preferred command-line tool and run the following command:

   
   

2. After installing the Insites CLI tool, run the following command to test if the tool was installed successfully:

   
   

   If everything went smoothly, the version number of the Insites CLI tool you installed is displayed (for example: 5.6.2).

Step 5: Deploy to your instance

To create a project and deploy it to your Insites Instance, following these steps:

1. Create an empty folder for your project.

2. Navigate to the project's folder in the command line.

3. Initialise the Insites directory structure.

4. Create your environment.

5. Upload your code to the Instance.

6. Once your codebase is uploaded, you can use sync to automatically push your code to the instance when you save the file.