Initialize the Project from the CLI

You can now begin working on your Catalyst project from the CLI. The first step is to initialize the project in an empty directory. This will be the home directory of your project and all of the project files will be saved in it.

You can learn more about this from the Project Directory Structure help page. You can learn about initializing a project in detail from the CLI help documentation.

For this tutorial, we will initialize an empty project without initializing any of the components. Since we will be working on the files downloaded earlier from the repository as directed in the introduction section, we will not be creating any components during the project initialization.

Create a folder for the project on your local machine and navigate to it from the terminal. Initialize a project by executing the following command from that directory:

Do not select any components. Press the Enter key to initialize.

The CLI will now ask you to associate a Catalyst project with the directory. Associate it with the project that we created earlier from the console. Select Catly from the list and press Enter.

Catalyst initialization is now complete.

The CLI will now create an empty project, with a blank catalyst.json and a .catalystrc hidden file containing your project details, in your project directory.

We will be adding files from the downloaded repository in this project directory.