Announcing Create Medusa App: One command for a full-stack headless e-commerce setup

Published in

Medusa

3 min readSep 15, 2021

With the new create-medusa-app tool you will get your Medusa development environment ready within a couple of minutes. After completion, you will have a Medusa backend, a Gatsby or Next.js storefront, and an admin dashboard up and running on your local machine.

Starting a new e-commerce project just got easier, now with one command.

Getting started with `create-medusa-app`

Use create-medusa-app with your preferred package manager:

yarn create medusa-appnpx create-medusa-app

Behind the scenes, create-medusa-app is populating your database with some initial set of mock data, which helps to interact with Medusa setup intuitively straight away.

Right after hitting one of those commands, the multistep installation process will be initiated, so the starter can be shaped right for the specific needs.

Destination folder

Enter the path to the directory that will become the root of your Medusa project:

? Where should your project be installed? › my-medusa-store

Pick the starter you prefer

? Which Medusa starter would you like to install? …
❯ medusa-starter-default
  medusa-starter-contentful
  Other

You will be presented with three options:

medusa-starter-default is the most lightweight version of a Medusa project
medusa-starter-contentful almost like the default starter, but with medusa-plugin-contentful preinstalled
Other if you have a different starter that you would wish to install from Other will give you the option of providing a URL to that starter. An additional question will be asked if you choose this option:

Where is the starter located? (URL or path) › https://github.com/somecoolusername/my-custom-medusa-starter

For the walkthrough purposes, we assume that the selected starter is medusa-starter-default and proceed to the next step.

Selecting a Storefront

After selecting your Medusa starter you will be given the option to install one of our storefront starters. At the moment we have starters for Gatsby and Next.js:

Which storefront starter would you like to install? …
❯ Gatsby Starter
  Next.js Starter
  None

You may also select None if the choice is to craft a custom storefront for your product.

create-medusa-app now has all of the info necessary for the installation to begin.

Creating new project from git: <https://github.com/medusajs/medusa-starter-default.git>
✔ Created starter directory layout
Installing packages...

Once the installation has been completed you will have a Medusa backend, a demo storefront, and an admin dashboard.

What’s inside

Inside the root folder which was specified at the beginning of the installation process the following structure could be found:

/my-medusa-store
  /storefront // Medusa storefront starter
  /backend // Medusa starter as a backend option 
  /admin // Medusa admin panel

create-medusa-app prints out the commands that are available to you after installation. When each project is started you can visit your storefront, complete the order, and view the order in Medusa admin.

⠴ Installing packages...
✔ Packages installed
Initialising git in my-medusa-store/admin
Create initial git commit in my-medusa-store/admin  Your project is ready 🚀. The available commands are:    Medusa API
    cd my-medusa-store/backend
    yarn start    Admin
    cd my-medusa-store/admin
    yarn start    Storefront
    cd my-medusa-store/storefront
    yarn start

What’s next?

To learn more about Medusa to go through our docs to get some inspiration and guidance for the next steps and further development:

If you have any follow-up questions or want to chat directly with our engineering team we are always happy to meet you at our Discord.