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Installation

There are 2 possible ways of installing DEITY Falcon (depends on what you want to do):

1. Install DEITY Falcon within an example template (using create-falcon-app)
2. Install DEITY Falcon sources to work on Falcon itself

Create Falcon App (CLI tool)

This CLI tool helps you to create your application based on DEITY Falcon with just one command.

TL;DR

Generate your app with:

npx

Yarn

npx create-falcon-app my-app

or

yarn create falcon-app my-app

then run the server app in one terminal:

cd my-app/server
npm start

and the client app in the second terminal:

cd my-app/client
npm start

then open http://localhost:3000 in your browser

Longer version

How to generate application

You can use either npx (installed with npm) or yarn to generate the application.

If you prefer yarn use yarn create with the syntax below (notice space between create and falcon-app):

npx

Yarn

npx create-falcon-app my-app

yarn create falcon-app my-app

Note: Please do not install the package globally

That command will create a my-app folder with 2 folders inside:

my-app/
 |- server
 |- client

Folder server contains the server application which is responsible for communication with external APIs and services. Folder client contains the client application responsible for front-end rendering.

Once npx create-falcon-app my-app or yarn create falcon-app my-app is done you can start both services. In one terminal window run the following commands to start the server part:

cd my-app/server
npm start # or yarn start

in the second terminal run the following commands to start the client part:

cd my-app/client
npm start # or yarn start

Selecting the template for your project during generation

Currently we provide just one template for the generator which delivers basic features of shop and blog (the template itself is called shop-with-blog.

In the future we'll provide more templates that can be selected with an --example option. Full command that uses shop-with-blog in that case will be as following:

npx create-falcon-app --example shop-with-blog my-app

You can also use npx create-falcon-app -h (or yarn create falcon-app -h) to get the list of the available templates and options.

Using your backend services

By default the shop-with-blog example uses demo Magento 2 and WordPress servers provided by DEITY so you can check how DEITY Falcon works. If you cannot start the server part (from within the server folder) or you see any problems with server behavior please contact us via our community slack channel.

Magento 2

If you want to connect the generated app to your own Magento 2 backend you will need to install the Falcon Magento2 module which delivers REST endpoints required by DEITY Falcon and change the configuration file of your Falcon-Server to point the application to the correct url.

See Installing Magento 2 Module for more.

Wordpress

Also if you want to connect a DEITY Falcon application to your WordPress server, you'll have to install Falcon WordPress module and also change the configuration file of your Falcon-Server to point the application to the correct server.

See Installing Wordpress 2 Module for more.

Development

If you want to help us building new features or fixing any reported issues for Falcon, there are several simple steps required:

• You need to fork DEITY Falcon repository
• Create a local clone of your fork
• Navigate to your local clone folder and run yarn command (which is required for local development)
• You are ready to go!

yarn is required to be installed to work with Lerna to ensure a proper Falcon's mono-repository installation.

Yarn will:

• Install all required packages
• Create symlinks between Falcon packages for you, so you don't have to bother about that
• Pre-build (compile) all required packages for you

Having this setup locally - you could use any of examples for local development, all examples will get Falcon packages "installed" (symlinked) directly from your local folder.

Package naming conventions

Back-end packages (FalconServer):

• falcon-X-extension - represents a module that should be used within a FalconServer app in order to provide an abstract (higher-level) access to the data (shop, blog, CRM etc)
• falcon-X-api - represents a module that should act as a "transport" layer between an extension and a certain back-end (REST API, remote GraphQL, service, database etc)

Front-end packages (FalconClient):

• falcon-X-plugin - represents a module that should be used within a FalconClient app in order to provide UI/UX (front-end) enhancements to the "client" application (analytics, maps, widgets etc)