Create a server with the Kitura CLI

The Kitura command-line interface (CLI) allows you to quickly generate a Kitura project.


Step 1: Installing the CLI

Install via brew (macOS)

For this installation you will need to have Homebrew installed. If you do not have Homebrew installed you can follow the Homebrew installation steps

Install Kitura’s Homebrew tap to allow ‘brew’ to access Kitura’s package repository:

brew tap ibm-swift/kitura

Install Kitura’s command-line interface:

brew install kitura

Verify that Kitura CLI is installed by running:

kitura --version

If the installation was successful we would see information about the version.

Install via curl (macOS or Linux)

You can install (either on Mac or Linux) with:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/Kitura/kitura-cli/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sudo bash

Verify that Kitura CLI is installed by running:

kitura --version

If the installation was successful we would see information about the version.


Step 2: Create a directory

Kitura CLI needs to be run in an empty directory so you will need to create a new directory for your server:

mkdir MyKituraApp && cd MyKituraApp

Step 3: Create a Kitura server

Create a Kitura application using the Kitura CLI:

kitura init

kitura init will create a cloud-ready Kitura application in your current directory.

The name of your project will be the same as the directory name.

The generated project contains a Swift 5.0 Package.swift file.


Step 4: Start the Kitura server

By default kitura init builds our server code so we just need to run the server:

swift run

Once the terminal output contains:

[INFO] [HTTPServer.swift:195 listen(on:)] Listening on port 8080

We can navigate to: localhost:8080 to view our server.


Next steps

Routing: Learn about routing and the two types Kitura supports.