Get started

Create the project

This tutorial builds words, a small app that counts the words of a text and ranks them. Four short pages take it from an empty folder to a published package.

Create the project and write the code.
Add a package from the registry.
Test the code.
Build and publish it.

You need the edge CLI. The Quickstart installs it.

Scaffold it

Run edge init with the name of the project.

edge init words

$ edge init words
  created words/
    ├─ index.html
    ├─ main.py
    └─ edge.json

  cd words && edge serve

text

It makes a folder with three files.

File	What it holds
`main.py`	The entry point, a script that prints one line
`edge.json`	The manifest of the project
`index.html`	A page that runs `main.py` in the browser

The manifest starts with one field.

{
  "edge": "0.9.4"
}

json

The edge field is the lowest engine the project runs on, the version of the CLI that made it. An older CLI refuses to run the project. Nothing else resolves until you declare it.

edge.json describes every field of the manifest.
edge init lists the flags of the command.

Write the code

Open main.py and replace its line with the word counter. You can also run it here.

def count_words(text):
    counts = {}
    for word in text.lower().split():
        word = word.strip(".,!?\"'")
        if word:
            counts[word] = counts.get(word, 0) + 1
    return counts

def top_words(text, n=3):
    counts = count_words(text)
    ranked = sorted(counts.items(), key=lambda pair: (-pair[1], pair[0]))
    return ranked[:n]

if __name__ == "__main__":
    text = "The cat sat on the mat. The cat slept."
    for word, count in top_words(text):
        print(word, count)

{}

the 3
cat 2
mat 1

Output

count_words lowercases the text, splits it on whitespace and strips punctuation from each word.
top_words sorts the counts from high to low and breaks a tie in alphabetical order.
The __main__ block runs only when main.py is the entry point. A test can import the two functions without printing anything.

Run it

From the words folder, run the script.

edge run main.py

It prints the same three lines as the example above. To see it in a browser, run edge serve and open the address it prints. The page reloads on every change.

Next step

Add a packageDeclare json, lock it and print the counts as JSON.