Getting Started Wednesday, April 17th, 2019

This is the first in the series introducing Mint and its features.

Why use Mint?

The following list should provide a nice incentive 🙂

• Strongly typed, JavaScript like syntax
• Immutable data structures and functional programming elements
• HTML like syntax for HTML elements and components
• Everything included:
• routing
• support for components
• styling with CSS
• standard library
• data store (like Redux)
• development server
• formatter
• environment variable handling
• test runner
• documentation server
• JavaScript interoperability
• Progressive Web Application support
• Optimized output (minified, mangled)
• Dead code elimination
• A single binary which contains the whole toolchain
• Uses React a Platform
• and more awesome features...

Installation

Mint comes as a single binary file: mint. To install it please follow the instructions on the install page (basically download the binary and add it to the PATH).

Creating a new project

Once you have Mint installed you can create a new project with the mint init command:

mint init my-awesome-project

If successful you should see this:

Mint - Initializing a new project
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⚙ Creating directory structure...
⚙ Writing initial files...

There are no dependencies!

There is nothing to do!
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
All done in 2.231ms!

This creates the following directory / file structure:

my-awesome-project
├── source
│   └── Main.mint
├── tests
│   └── Main.mint
├── .gitignore
└── mint.json

Development server

Mint comes with a built-in development server which recompiles the code (and reloads the browser) when something changes, to start it go into the project directory and run the mint start command:

If successful you should see this:

Mint - Running the development server
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⚙ Ensuring dependencies... 181μs
⚙ Parsing files... 2.608ms
⚙ Development server started on http://127.0.0.1:3000/

Now you can open the running project on http://127.0.0.1:3000/ or http://localhost:3000/

If the project is running you should see this:

Now you are up and running with a Mint project locally 🎉

Online Playground

If you just want to mess around without installing, you can use the sandbox on the website.