Understanding a Frontity project

Guide to help you understand what is involved in a Frontity project

What you get in a new Frontity project.

If you have followed our quick start guide you probably have already a new Frontity project. If not, run npx frontity create <project-name> and you'll get a project with the same structure as the one explained in this guide.

So, the important pieces that you get, once a project is created, are:

• A package.json file where the dependencies needed for your app to work are declared.

• A frontity.settings.js file where the basic setup for your app is already populated.

• A packages folder with mars-theme installed inside.

The package.json file

The basic dependencies we'll need for our app to work are:

• frontity : this is the main package, where we can find all the methods we might need to use during development. It's also where the CLI lives.

• @frontity/core : here is where the magic happens. Core takes care of all the bundling, rendering, merging, transpiling, serving, etc. We don't need to access to it in order to develop a Frontity app.

• @frontity/wp-source : this package is the one that connects to the WordPress REST API of your site and fetches all the data needed on your Frontity theme.

• @frontity/tiny-router : this is a small package that handles window.history and helps us with the routing on mars-theme.

• @frontity/mars-theme : this is our starter theme, where we build our site with React.

As you can see, our mars-theme dependency has no version but a path. This is how we need to add our custom packages (those we are developing inside the app) to our package.json so they will be treated as if they were living in node_modules.

The frontity.settings.js file

In this file we define our project settings. We also define the extensions needed to successfully run a Frontity app. You can learn more about this file in the Settings reference.

The packages folder

In this folder is where we create all the custom extensions we want to develop for our site. Usually it will be a custom theme. In this case, the one installed by default is our mars-theme. Any changes done in these extensions during development will refresh our site automatically.

How does everything work together

When starting frontity, all the packages defined in frontity.settings.js are imported by @frontity/file-settings and the settings and exports from each package are merged by @frontity/core into a single store where you can access the state and actions of the different packages during development using @frontity/connect (our state manager).

Still have questions? Ask the community! We are here to help 😊