Quickstart

In this guide you’ll learn how to create a demo Hoodie app, learn about the basic structure of a Hoodie project and its folders, the endpoints and app URLs and how to include and use the Hoodie library in your project.

Prerequisites

For all operating systems, you’ll need Node.js installed. You can download Node from nodejs.org. We recommend the LTS (Long Term Support) version.

Make sure you have version 4 or higher. You can find out with

$ node -v

Create a new Hoodie Backend

First you need to create a new folder, let’s call it testapp

$ mkdir testapp

Change into the testapp directory.

$ cd testapp

Now we need to create a package.json file. For that we can use npm which comes with Node by default. It will ask you a few questions, you can simply press enter to leave the default values.

$ npm init

Now we can install hoodie using npm

$ npm install hoodie --save

The resulting package.json file in the current folder, should look something like this

{
  "name": "funky",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "hoodie",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

Now you can start Hoodie with

$ npm start

Great, your Hoodie backend started up and is now telling you at which URL you can access it. By default that is http://127.0.0.1:8080

Congratulations, you just created your first Hoodie Backend :) You can now load the Hoodie client on any website with

<script src="http://127.0.0.1:8080/hoodie/client.js"></script>

You can also create a public/index.html file, which will be served at http://127.0.0.1:8080 after you restart the server. All assets in the public folder, like images, CSS files or JavaScript files, will be served by your Hoodie Backend at http://127.0.0.1:8080/<path/to/your/file.ext>.

What’s next?

Our Hoodie Tracker App is a great place to see how to use a Hoodie backend. It’s an intentionally simple and well commented application built with only HTML, JavaScript and CSS, without using any library or framework. You can see it running at https://tracker.hood.ie/

Having Trouble?

Sorry it didn’t go smoothly for you. Come chat with us or ask a question on StackOverflow