Getting Started With Vapor 3 Part 1:

Installing Vapor and Creating A Project

Posted 7/5/2018.

Vapor is a web framework for Swift. It runs on macOS, iOS, and Linux, and can be used to build websites, web applications, and APIs. Frameworks like Vapor make it possible to build entire products in Swift, including a backend, web app, marketing site, and Apple device app (iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS). In fact, this website was build using Vapor.

In this series we'll build a basic API for managing information about U.S. national parks. We'll start in this tutorial by installing Vapor, setting up a Vapor project, and running a Vapor app in Xcode.

Installing Vapor

  1. Make sure you have the latest version of Xcode.

This tutorial is current as of Xcode 9.4.1.

  1. Verify your version of Xcode is compatible with Vapor. In Terminal, run:
eval "$(curl -sL check.vapor.sh)"

✅  Xcode 9 is compatible with Vapor 2.
✅  Xcode 9 is compatible with Vapor 3.
✅  Swift 4.1 is compatible with Vapor 2.
✅  Swift 4.1 is compatible with Vapor 3.
  1. Install Vapor with Homebrew, a popular package manager for macOS. If you haven't already installed Homebrew, run the following in Terminal:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Then, run:

brew install vapor/tap/vapor

  1. Run vapor --help in Terminal. You should see a list of commands you can run with vapor. We'll be covering most of them in this series.

  2. Run vapor new --help in Terminal to see more information on what you can do with the new command. Try this with a few other commands listed in 4).

  3. Navigate to the directory you would like to use for your Vapor project.

cd ~/path/to/directory
  1. Create the Vapor app. In Terminal, run:
vapor new NationalParks
  1. Generate and open the Xcode project for this app. In Terminal, run:
vapor xcode -y --verbose

When running vapor xcode, Vapor will ask you if you want to open the new Xcode project when it finishes. Running the command with '-y' tells Vapor you want to open it automatically. Adding '-- verbose' shows you what Vapor is doing as it generates the project.

  1. Check the toolbox and framework versions. In Terminal, run:
vapor --version

You should see the following (or a later version):

Vapor Toolbox: 3.1.7
Vapor Framework: 3.0.4

Hello World

The above setup generates an Xcode project using Vapor's default template, api. This template includes an example model (Todo) and controller along with some sample routes. To see the default routes, go to routes.swift. You should see the following code at the top:

router.get("hello") { req in
    return "Hello, world!"
}

This is one of the most basic routes you can write in Vapor, a simple GET request that prints "Hello, world!".

To test out the new app, in Xcode switch to the Run scheme, build, and run. Once you see the log message in Xcode, go to localhost:8080/hello in the browser of your choice. You should see "Hello, world!".

In this tutorial we saw how to install Vapor and build the default api template. This template includes a lot of code you may not need. Vapor is a powerful framework with a lot of flexibility and a growing community of open source contributors, with a range of packages for building modern APIs. In the next part we'll cover the structure of a Vapor app.

Next Steps