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Installation

How to install and set up your first Athenna project.

Meet Athenna​

Athenna is a framework written specially for the Node.js runtime with expressive and elegant syntax. The framework provides a reliable code foundation and starting point for creating your application, allowing you to focus on creating something amazing while we sweat the details.

Athenna strives to provide an amazing developer experience while providing powerful features such as thorough dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, unit and e2e testing, and more.

Whether you are new to Node.js ecosystem or have years of experience, Athenna is a framework that can grow with you. We'll help you take your first steps as a developer or give you a boost as you take your expertise to the next level. We can't wait to see what you build, make sure to share it with us in our Discord community.

tip

New to Athenna? Check out the Athenna YouTube channel for an infinity of hands-on videos!

Why Athenna?​

There are a variety of tools and frameworks available to you when building a software using Node.js. However, we believe Athenna is the best choice for building modern microservices.

A progressive framework​

We like to call Athenna a "progressive" framework. By that, we mean that Athenna grows with you. If you're just taking your first steps into backend development, Athenna's vast library of documentation, guides, and video tutorials will help you learn the ropes without becoming overwhelmed.

If you're a senior developer, Athenna gives you robust tools for dependency injection, unit and e2e testing, database abstracted layer and more. Athenna is fine-tuned for building professional applications and ready to handle enterprise work loads.

A scalable framework​

Athenna is incredibly scalable. Thanks to the scaling-friendly nature of Node.js and great libraries like Fastify, horizontal scaling with Athenna is a breeze. In fact, Athenna REST API's have been easily scaled to handle hundreds of millions of requests per month.

An agnostic framework​

Athenna is perpect for building modern software using microservices architecture. No matter what type of application you are creating, be it a REST API, a CLI, a Cron Job, Athenna has a reliable solution foundation for each occasion, the only thing you will need to take care is how your application will communicate with the external world.

A community framework​

Athenna is not reinventing the whell, the framework combines the best packages in the Node.js ecosystem to offer the most robust and developer friendly framework. We are always seeking for talented developers like you to help us by contributing to the framework and make it even better.

Your first Athenna project​

Prerequisites​

First, you need to install Node.js. We recommend using nvm to do that.

Click here to install nvm and get npm and Node.js running on your machine.

After you install nvm, we recommend you to install Node.js v20.x or above, this is the current version that the project is being developed, but you can still use Node.js v16.x and above. Install Node.js v20.x by running:

nvm install 20

We recommend setting Node.js v20.x as the default version, to do so with nvm run:

nvm alias default 20.8.1

Installing via package manager​

We want it to be as easy as possible to get started with Athenna. With that in mind, we developed a CLI to assist in the creation of a new project.

npm install -g @athenna/cli

Then you can run this command to generate your project:

athenna new my-project-name

The installation process prompts for the following selections:

Application type​

  • REST Api application is ideal for creating a Http server using REST architecture.
  • CLI application is ideal for creating global CLI's to publish in some registry like npm.

Project structure​

The installation process will ask if you want to create your project with a slim project structure. All the Athenna packages implementation assumes that you are using the default project structure, but you will always be able to use your own and configure the packages to work with it.

Running your application​

To run your application in development mode, run the following command:

node artisan serve --watch
  • The serve command will look up for your Path.bootstrap('main.ts') file to bootstrap your application with predefined configurations.
  • The watch flag is meant to watch the file system for changes and restart your application automatically when doing some change on it.

What the 🤬 is Path.boostrap('main.ts')?​

Well, Athenna tries a lot to be a framework without opinion, one thing that some frameworks do that makes them to have a lot of opinion is defining crucial file paths where you can't touch that file without breaking everything.

Athenna is not totally different from them in this aspect, as you can see, the node artisan serve command depends on the existence of the ./bootstrap/main.ts file. To be able to be "opinion less" without losing DX (Developer Experience) we ensure that you can easily configure this path the way you want by doing two things:

  1. In all places of our documentation you will see that we always use the Path helper to reference file paths, so your brain could detect that the directory path you just see is configurable.
  2. Inside .athennarc.json file or the athenna property of your package.json you have the directories property where you can modify any path supported by the Path helper.

Ok, now you might be asking yourself: what the 🤬 is .athennarc.json? Be patient, we gonna see later on this documentation page 😆.

Initial configuration​

All of the configuration files for the Athenna framework are stored in the Path.config() directory. Each option is documented, so feel free to look through the files and get familiar with the options available to you.

Athenna needs almost no additional configuration out of the box. You are free to get started developing! However, you may wish to review the Path.config('app.ts') file and its documentation. It contains several options such as locale that you may wish to change according to your application.

Environment based configuration​

Since many of Athenna's configuration option values may vary depending on whether your application is running on your local machine or in production, many important configuration values are defined using the .env file that exists at the root of your application.

Your .env file should not be committed to your application's source control, since each developer / server using your application could require a different environment configuration. Furthermore, this would be a security risk in the event an intruder gains access to your source control repository, since any sensitive credentials would get exposed.

note

For more information about the .env file and environment based configuration, check out the full configuration documentation.

Workspace and runtime configurations​

Inside the root directory of your project, there is a file called .athennarc.json or the athenna property of your package.json. These configurations are used by Athenna for configuring the workspace and certain runtime settings of your Athenna application. Basically any configuration related to how the framework will bootstrap and behave should be defined in these configuration.

note

Always remember that if you can't find the .athennarc.json file in the root path of you project, it will be defined inside of your package.json in the athenna property.

For more information about the RC file, more details about each one of its options and also how to define your own properties inside of it check out the full Athenna RC file documentation.

Next steps​

Now that you have created your Athenna project, you may be wondering what to learn next. First, we strongly recommend becoming familiar with how Athenna works by reading the following documentation:

How you want to use Athenna will also dictate the next steps on your journey. Since Athenna has different kind of applications, there are a variety of ways to use Athenna, and we'll explore the available ones bellow.

tip

New to Athenna? Check out the Athenna YouTube channel for an infinity of hands-on videos!

REST API application​

Use the REST API Application to serve as an API backend to single page application or mobile apps. In this context you may use Athenna for data storage / retrieval for your REST API, while also taking advantage of Athenna's powerful services such as database, emails, notifications, and more.

If this is how you plan to use Athenna, you may want to check out our documentation on routing and the ORM.

Command Line Interface (CLI) application​

Use the command line interface (CLI) application to create libraries like athenna for NPM where other developers could install it in their terminal. In this context you may use Athenna for automatting process or generating files, while also taking advantage of all Athenna's powerful foundation.

If this is how you plan to use Athenna, you may want to check out our documentation on commands.