Getting Started
This guide will help you get your new SaaS app up and running.
Install Wasp
Pre-requisites
You must have Node.js (and NPM) installed on your machine and available in PATH
to use Wasp.
Your version of Node.js must be >= 18.
To switch easily between Node.js versions, we recommend using nvm.
Linux and macOS
Open your terminal and run:
Windows
In order to use Wasp on Windows, you need to install WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and a Linux distribution of your choice. We recommend using Ubuntu.
You can refer to this article for a step by step guide to using Wasp in the WSL environment. If you need further help, reach out to us on Discord.
Once in WSL2, run the following command in your WSL2 environment:
Finalize Installation
Run the following command to verify that Wasp was installed correctly:
Also be sure to install the Wasp VSCode extension to get the best DX, e.g. syntax highlighting, code scaffolding, autocomplete, etc.
Setting up your SaaS app
Cloning the OpenSaaS template
From the directory where you’d like to create your new project run:
Then select option [3] saas
from the list of templates after entering the name of your project.
This will clone a clean copy of the Open SaaS template into a new directory! 🎉
Start your DB
Before you start your app, you need to have a Postgres Database connected and running. With Wasp, that’s super easy!
First, make sure you have Docker installed and running. If not, download and install it here
With Docker running, open a new terminal window/tab and position yourself in the app
directory:
Then run:
This will start and connect your app to a Postgres database for you. No need to do anything else! 🤯 Just make sure to leave this terminal window open in the background while developing. Once you terminate the process, your DB will no longer be available to your app.
Now let’s initalize the database. Open a new terminal tab/window and run the following command:
You will also need to run wasp db migrate-dev
whenever you make changes to your Prisma schema (entities).
If you want to see or manage your DB via Prisma’s DB Studio GUI, open yet another separate terminal tab/window and run:
Start your app
In a new terminal window/tab, first make sure you’re in the app/
directory:
Copy the .env.server.example
file to .env.server
.
You don’t have to fill in your API keys right away, but leave the placeholder strings for the time being as this will allow you to run the app.
Then run:
This will install all dependencies and start the client and server for you :)
Go to localhost:3000
in your browser to view it (your NodeJS server will be running on port 3001
)
Run Blog and Docs
This SaaS app comes with a docs and blog section built with the Starlight template on top of the Astro framework. You can use this as a starting point for your own blog and documentation, if necessary.
If you do not need this, you can simply delete the blog
folder from the root of the project.
If you want to run the Starlight docs and blog, first navigate to the blog
folder:
Then run:
Then start the development server:
Getting Updates to the Open SaaS Template
We will be updating the Open SaaS template with new features and improvements. To get these updates, you can pull the changes from the original template into your own repository.
First, you need to add the original template as a remote upstream
repository:
Then, you can fetch the changes from the original template:
And finally, merge the changes into your local repository:
What’s next?
Awesome! We have our new app ready and we know how to run both it and the blog/docs! Now, in the next section, we’ll give you a quick “guided tour” of the different parts of the app we created and understand how it works.