How to Get Up and Running With SvelteKit

TLDR: npm init svelte@next <app name>

SvelteKit is a framework for building web applications that abstracts away the boring stuff, so you don’t have to. Seriously, it’s pre-configured for build optimization, prefetching, server or client-side rendering, and offline support. This allows you to focus on the fun aspects of building a web app instead of all the setup.

As someone that enjoys tinkering and optimization, I was skeptical at first, but I’ve come around to Svelte and, by extension, SvelteKit.

To get started, we need to run a few commands:

  • npm init svelte@next app-name
  • npm install in the created directory 👆🏼
  • npm run dev

You now have a SvelteKit app running on your local machine and can see a basic app that asks you to edit the page to see changes with hot module reloading enabled.

We can add a new route by creating a new file named about.svelte in ./src/routes that will correspond to the /about route for the app. This will create a new page that we can style and fill with our desired content.

Or we can add an endpoint at ./src/routes/dadJoke.js and set up an async function to fetch a joke from the dad joke api.

Hopefully, this gave you an idea of how quick it is to get up and running with SvelteKit.

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