2. Initialize a Project

With the Garden CLI installed, we'll kick off by configuring a simple example project for use with Garden.

Start by cloning our repo and finding the example project:

git clone https://github.com/garden-io/garden.git
cd garden/examples/demo-project-start

This directory contains two directories, with one container service each, backend and frontend. We'll first define a boilerplate Garden project, and then a Garden module for each of the services.

To initialize the project, we can use a helper command:

garden create project

This will create a basic boilerplate project configuration in the current directory, making it our project root. With the comments stripped out, it should look something like this:

kind: Project
name: demo-project
environments:
  - name: default
providers:
  - name: local-kubernetes

We have one environment (default) and a single provider. We'll get back to this later.

Next, let's create module configs for each of our two modules, starting with backend:

cd backend
garden create module
cd ..

You'll get a suggestion to make it a container module. Pick that, and give it the default name as well. Then do the same for the frontend module:

cd frontend
garden create module
cd ..

This is now enough configuration to build the project. Before we can deploy, we need to configure services in each module configuration, as well as set up a local cluster or connect to a remote cluster.

Starting with the former, go ahead and open the newly created backend/garden.yml file. You'll find a number of commented-out fields, which reveal all the options available for the container module type. One of the is the services field. Just to keep things simple for now, go ahead and replace that block (or append to the file) the following:

services:
  - name: backend
    ports:
      - name: http
        containerPort: 8080
        servicePort: 80
    ingresses:
      - path: /hello-backend
        port: http

This is enough information for Garden to be able to deploy and expose the backend service. Now do the same for the frontend service, with the following block:

services:
  - name: frontend
    ports:
      - name: http
        containerPort: 8080
    ingresses:
      - path: /hello-frontend
        port: http
      - path: /call-backend
        port: http
    dependencies:
      - backend

This does the same for the frontend service, with the addition of declaring a runtime dependency on the backend service.

Now, let's move on to our next section, and connect to a Kubernetes cluster.