How to Create Elm App

2 min readSep 17, 2016

Create Elm App is a command-line tool to ease getting started-experience and help you bootstrap and develop your Elm applications without any configuration done from your side, so you can focus on the code!

It is heavily inspired by the Create React App developed by Dan Abramov from Facebook and other awesome developers from React community.

Getting Started

Installation

Node.js 4.x and above is the only dependency for installing Create Elm App

npm install -g create-elm-app

Creating an App

When the installation is ready you can create your Elm app.

create-elm-app my-app

Give it a couple seconds while elm-package is installing core modules for your application behind the scenes.

When installation is finished you are ready to go with your new app!

The file structure is minimalistic and provides you only with the main entry points for writing your code.

my-app/
  .gitignore
  README.md
  elm-package.json
  src/
    favicon.ico
    index.html
    index.js
    main.css
    Main.elm

Building for production

You can get a fully optimized and production-ready build of your newly created application by running the following command in the root directory of your project:

cd my-app/
elm-app build

Starting development server

During the development process you can start a server which will enable you to access your application by visiting http://localhost:3000/

elm-app start

It is configured to use Hot Module Replacement with elm-hot-loader automatically so that you can see the changes without reloading the page multiple times.

Installing Elm packages

http://package.elm-lang.org/ offers you a lot of awesome packages to use in your app.

To install one, type the following command in your terminal:

elm-app package install evancz/elm-http -y

No lock-on

You don’t have to stay with Create Elm App forever and if you are not satisfied with some decisions you can always do:

elm-app eject

And take over the build configuration so you can play with it and find what fits you best!

Any feedback is very welcome.