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Serverpod is an open-source, scalable app server, written in Dart for the Flutter community. Serverpod automatically generates your protocol and client-side code by analyzing your server. Calling a remote endpoint is as easy as making a local method call.

caution

This is an early release of Serverpod. The API is stable and used in production by multiple projects, but there may be minor changes in future updates. A few features are still missing that will be part of the 1.0 release. See the roadmap for more information on what's in the works.

Installing Serverpod

Serverpod is tested on Mac, support for Windows and Linux is still experimental. Before you can install Serverpod, you need to the following tools installed:

• Flutter and Dart. You will need Flutter version 2.10 or later. https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install
• Docker. Docker is used to manage Postgres and Redis. https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/

Once you have Flutter and Docker installed and configured, open up a terminal and install Serverpod by running:

dart pub global activate serverpod_cli

Now test the install by running:

serverpod

If everything is correctly configured, the help for the serverpod command is now displayed.

Creating your first project

To get your local server up and running, you need to create a new Serverpod project. Make sure that Docker Desktop is running, then create a new project by running serverpod create.

serverpod create mypod

This command will create a new directory called mypod, with three dart packages inside; mypod_server, mypod_client, and mypod_flutter.

• mypod_server: This package contains your server-side code. Modify it to add new endpoints or other features your server needs.
• mypod_client: This is the code needed to communicate with the server. Typically, all code in this package is generated automatically, and you should not edit the files in this package.
• mypod_flutter: This is the Flutter app, pre-configured to connect to your local server.

info

It can take up to a few minutes the first time you run serverpod create. This is because Docker will need to download and build the containers used by Serverpod.

Starting the server

Start your Docker containers with docker-compose up --build --detach, it will start Postgres and Redis. Then, run dart bin/main.dart to start your server.

cd mypod/mypod_server
docker-compose up --build --detach
dart bin/main.dart

If everything is working you should see something like this on your terminal:

SERVERPOD version: 0.9.11 mode: development time: 2022-09-12 17:22:02.825468Z
Insights listening on port 8081
Server default listening on port 8080
Webserver listening on port 8082

info

If you need to stop the Docker containers at some point, just run docker-compose stop or use the Docker Desktop application.