Creating your first project

In this recipe we'll create our first project.

How to do it...

We'll begin with the Ember CLI tool to create our first project.

1. Open the command prompt and type the following command:

   $ ember new my-project
   

   This will create a brand new project called my-project. The project structure will have everything that we need to get started.

2. To display this project, we can simply run the server command:

   $ cd my-project
   $ ember server
   

   The ember server command will start up a web server on port 4200. You can access this port by opening http://localhost:4200. You should see the default Welcome to Ember website.

   Tip

   It is a good idea to keep the Ember server running while developing your application. Ember CLI uses a tool called LiveReload to refresh the web browser when changes are made. This can be useful to see how new changes are affecting your application. To run LiveReload, simply type ember server. This will start the server with LiveReload.

3. The server command defaults to port 4200. You can easily change this using the --port argument:

   $ ember server --port 1234
   

   This will start the server on port 1234 instead of the default 4200.

4. Another useful option is the --proxy argument. This will proxy all Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) requests to the given address. Let's say that we have a node server running on port 8080. We can run the server as follows:

   $ ember server --proxy http://127.0.0.1:8080
   

   For every Ajax request, Ember now will send these requests to the localhost at port 8080.

   Tip

   Keep in mind that as of Ember 2.0, Internet Explorer (IE) 8 support has been dropped. All modern web browsers and versions of IE after 8 work fine. If by chance IE 8 support is needed, Ember.js version 1.13 has extended browser support and should work with it.

How it works...

The ember server command creates a Node.js Express server. This server uses LiveReload and refreshes the web page whenever any changes are made. The server command accepts different arguments, including --proxy and --port.

There's more...

When running the server, you have access to tests. After you start the server, you'll have access to the QUnit interface. QUnit is a JavaScript unit testing framework. It is used to run your integration and acceptance tests. To access the interface, navigate your browser to http://localhost:4200/tests. This will show all your tests in the project. From here, you can see which tests passed and which failed. We will cover this in the later chapters: