Create a Quickstart Project

Introduction to quickstart projects

Quickstart projects provide an easy way to start the development of a new application.

Traditionally, creating a new project is a tedious process that involves many different components. Obviously, we need to write the code of our new application and run many tests. On top of that, we need a mechanism to compile the code, to run the tests, to create a distribution, and so on and so forth. But it does not end there. Local development is only the beginning. We need to run performance, integration, and other types of tests that are too cumbersome to run locally. We need to deploy our application to different environments so that we can validate its readiness. We need to deal with branches and pull requests. A lot of things need to happen before a new release is deployed to production.

Quickstarts help us with those and some other tasks. They allow us to skip the tedious process and be up-and-running with a new project in a matter of minutes. Later on, once we get a better understanding of what we need, we might need to modify the code and the configurations provided by quickstarts. That will be the subject of the follow-up writings. For now, our objective is to start a new project with the least possible effort, while still getting most of the things we need for local development as well as for the application’s lifecycle that ends with the deployment to production.

That was enough of an introduction to Jenkins X quickstarts. We’ll explore details through practical examples.

Creating a quickstart project

Like most other jx commands, we can create a quickstart project using the interactive or the batch mode. We’ll take a look at the former first.