Skeletal Elm project

With all the Elm tools installed. It is time to take them for a spin. Right from the Elm is a very friendly language. When you ask Elm for help

elm --help

It will thank you for trying out Elm, give you some pointers where to find more information and tell you about some command options. We are interested in the elm init command. It promises to

Start an Elm project. It creates a starter elm.json file and provides a link explaining what to do from there.

This is a nice starting point. Run the command to start an Elm project. The skeletal project creates the following files and directories.

.
├── elm.json
└── src

The elm.json describes the Elm project. We describe it in more detail later in the tutorial. Besides the elm.json file there is a directory called src. This is where all the source files go.

An empty src directory is an unhappy src directory. So let's go ahead and create a file named FlashCard.elm inside the src directory with the following content

module FlashCard exposing (..)

import Html


main =
    Html.text "Hello, World!"

Verification

One of the cool things about Elm is that it can serve your files. By spinning up a reactor Elm will look at your files, create a web server, serve your files and when necessary compile them on the fly.

elm reactor

The above command will start the Elm reactor. The message that it returns with asks you to got to http://localhost:8000. Going to that address you will find a file navigation pane. Navigate it to src > FlashCard.elm and be greeting by your very own Hello, World!