Getting Started

First make sure janet is installed

Next, install the joy cli like this

jpm install joy

Hopefully the joy executable will be on your path and ready to roll. Now, run the following from your terminal

joy new my-joy-project

This should create a new directory called my-joy-project and it should create a few files and things to get you started. Next, let’s create a database, a table and connect it with routes and a few functions for handling requests.

Create a new sqlite database

If you aren’t already in the my-joy-project directory, go ahead and get in there. Now run

joy create db

This creates a new empty database named dev.sqlite3. Let’s fill it up.

Note, the default template doesn’t assume you want a database so you’ll need to connect to it in main.janet:

; # main.janet

(defn main [& args]
  (db/connect (env :database-url))
  (server app (env :port))
  (db/disconnect))

Taking it for a spin

Alright now that we have a project and a sqlite database set up, it’s time to test it out in the browser:

joy server

This should start an http server that’s listening at http://localhost:9001.

Create a database table

Run this to create a new migration with a table with a few columns:

joy create table account 'email text not null unique' 'password text not null'

This has created one file in your db/migrations folder that is waiting to get applied to the database.

Run database migrations

Run this from your terminal

joy migrate

This will output what just happened to your database and create a new file db/schema.sql.

Generate helpful routes

In joy there are no ORMs, no classes, and no objects, just functions that take requests and return responses.

Let’s generate a few routes for the table from earlier:

joy create controller account

Those commands have created another new file: routes/account.janet and updated your main.janet file with an import statement so the account routes get set up.

Go ahead and check out the new account routes in the browser now: http://localhost:9001/accounts

Joy can do a lot more than that, check out the docs here