Get Started

Kickstart your Mobify Platform project with this complete guide. Install required software and dependencies and run your project locally for the first time!

System requirements

Supported operating systems

The Mobify Platform supports the following operating systems:

macOS 10.13 or greater
Windows 7 or greater
Ubuntu Linux 18.x or greater

Recommended hardware

We recommend the following for your hardware setup, at a minimum:

16 GB RAM
Solid-state drive (SSD)
2 or more CPU cores

Node and NPM

Supported versions

We currently support versions ^10.17.0 and ^12.x of Node. Whenever possible, we recommend using the more recent of the two. Other versions of Node are not supported and may result in unexpected errors once your project is deployed.

Important

If you need to manage multiple versions of Node, we recommend that Windows users install Volta and avoid using Corey Butler’s Node Version Manager (nvm) for Windows.

For Mac and Linux users, we recommend installing Node Version Manager.

Installation

Before you start development, you’ll need to install specific versions of Node and Node Package Manager (NPM) on any computers that you plan to use for development.

Go to the Node 12.x download page and download the right installer for your machine.
Windows users: Download the .msi file that corresponds to your processor. For example, if you have a 64-bit Intel processor, you would choose the x64 installer.
Mac users: Download the .pkg file.
Linux users: Download the -linux file that corresponds to your processor. For example, if you have a 64-bit Intel processor, you would choose the linux-x64 installer in your preferred archive format.
Run the installer and complete the setup instructions.
When prompted by the installer, accept the default option to also install the Node.js runtime, install Node Package Manager, and add the Node.js runtime to your path.

Verifying installations

Open a terminal (or the Command Prompt on Windows)
Run node -v
It should return v12.21.0 (or the latest 12.x version)
Run npm -v
It should return 6.14.11

Installing NPM manually

If you have a different version of NPM installed, you can install version 6.14.11 manually.

Open a terminal (or the Command Prompt on Windows)
Run npm install -g npm@6.14.11
Run npm -v again
It should now return 6.14.11

Project files

In most cases, a project will already be generated for you and managed in a code repository. Reach out to your team lead for access to the repository.

To generate a new project from scratch, open a terminal (or the Command Prompt on Windows) and run the following command:


npx @mobify/create-app

Installing dependencies

To download and install package dependencies, open a terminal (or the Command Prompt on Windows) and run the following command in your project directory:


npm ci

Note

It might take a few minutes before you see any activity, so don’t cancel the process until it finishes. Thanks for your patience!

Start your dev server

To start your local web server for local development, run the following command in your project directory:


npm start

Now that the development server is running, you can open your commerce app in a browser:

Go to http://localhost:3000/

Success! You should now see the home page for your app.

To preview a server-side rendered page, append the ?mobify_server_only query string to the URL you’d like to preview. For example, you can test the server-side rendered version of www.example.com by visiting the URL www.example.com?mobify_server_only.

You can stop the development server at any time by using the keyboard shortcut Control-C.