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Version: 0.9.9

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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 and Linux (Mac recommended), support for Windows is experimental. Before you can install Serverpod, you need to the following tools installed:

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.

caution

If you are running on Windows, a few extra steps are required when setting up a new project. The serverpod create command will guide you through the process.

Starting the server​

Start your Docker container with docker-compose up -d build, then serverpod run command will start your server.

cd mypod/mypod_server
docker-compose up -d --build
serverpod run

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

Starting Serverpod.

 • Automatic generate and reload are enabled.

Spinning up serverpod generate (this can take a few seconds).
Starting Docker (for Postgres and Redis).
Waiting for Postgres on localhost:8090.
Waiting for Redis on localhost:8091.
Setup complete. Starting the server.

SERVERPOD version: 0.9.x mode: development
Insights listening on port 8081
Server id 0 listening on port 8080
info

You can also start Postgres, Redis and the server manually without using the serverpod run command. To do this, first cd into mypod_server, then run:

docker-compose up -d --build

This will build and start a set of Docker containers and give access to Postgres and Redis. If you need to stop the containers at some point, just run docker-compose stop.

Now you should be all set to run your server. Start it by typing:

dart bin/main.dart