Getting Started With Vapor 4.0

What is Vapor?

Vapor is a modern server-side swift framework. It’s community built , with tons of support for databases, hosting and user management. It’s built on my favorite language Swift, meaning it’s easy to learn, and has type safety built in.

I’ll be building a small time tracking API similar to Toggl over the course of a few posts, this is the first in this series.

Get Started - Installation

Install Swift

If you’re running a Mac, and already have Xcode installed. Great, you can skip this step. If not, go to the App Store and download it.

If you’re running a Linux computer, you’ll have to go over to the Swift Downloads page, and follow the instructions there for your distribution.

Install Vapor

We’re going to need the vapor toolbox to run any project we make.

To install it on mac, you’ll need homebrew installed. Once installed, run brew install vapor and homebrew will install it all for you. Then when it’s done, verify your installation by running vapor -help. You should see a list of available commands.

If you’re on Linux, you’ll have to build vapor from source. Just run these commands in a terminal.

git clone https://github.com/vapor/toolbox.git
cd toolbox
git checkout <desired version>
make install

Then verify it’s installed correctly by running vapor -help.

Creating a project

Now, we’re going to set up our working directory. I’m going to build a time logging API, so I’ll name my project TimeLog.

We’ll just run vapor new TimeLog and follow the prompts given to you. You’ll probably want to answer no to all the questions and get a bare-bones template to get started. For that, you can add a -n flag to the end of the prevous command like this vapor new TimeLog -n.

Sweet! Now you have an empty vapor project!

Get a Database Running

I’m going to be using the Postgres database, as it’s the one I have the most experience with. Vapor supports tons of databases. So you should be able to follow along with this tutorial no matter which one you choose.

If you don’t have any databases installed, I’d recommend Postgres. This gist helped me a lot when I first installed it.

Since I’m using Postgres, I’ve created a database named time-table and opened the database to the url postgres://<Admin-Name>:@localhost:5432/time-table. Since this isn’t goint to be a public project quite yet, I left off giving the database a password. If you’re planning on releasing this server to the world, you need a password.

Once you have the url of your database, make a .env file in the root directory of your project. Then, insert the url you just made like this DB_URL=postgres://<Admin-Name>:@localhost:5432/time-table on the first line. Then you’re all set with your database.

Finally, Swift

Dependencies

Make an Xcode project by running vapor xcode in your project’s directory.

For this series, I’m going to be using a few SPM packages. If you’re following along, install them by opening the Package.swift and adding these three dependencies below .product(name: "Vapor", package: "vapor"),:

.product(name: "Fluent", package: "fluent"),
.product(name: "FluentPostgresDriver", package: "fluent-postgres-driver"),
.product(name: "JWT", package: "jwt")

Then, below where it says .package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/vapor.git", from: "4.0.0"), add these lines.

.package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/fluent.git", from: "4.0.0"),
.package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/fluent-postgres-driver.git", from: "2.0.0"),
.package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/jwt.git", from: "4.0.0-rc.1"),

This will install Fluent, Vapor’s database framework, JWT, which we’ll use for user authentication and the Fluent Postgres Driver so we can use our Postgres database.

Connect the database

In your configure.swift file under Sources > App add the following extension to the top of the file.

extension Application {
    static let databaseURL = URL(string: Environment.get("DB_URL")!)!
}

This uses the .env file we made earlier to get the database url. You can use .env files for other things like admin keys and passwords you don’t want plain in your code for anyone to see.

Now lets use that url in the configure(_ ) function add the following line to the top.

try app.databases.use(.postgres(url: Application.databaseURL), as: .psql)

Right now, Xcode will throw an error, so import the required dependencies at the top of the file.

import Fluent
import FluentPostgresDriver
import JWT

Conclusion

There we go! You now have an empty vapor project with an empty database and all the dependencies installed. I’ll be making a part 2 soon for this series, when it’s up it’ll be linked right here!

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