Set up an Xperience by Kentico project

Before you begin building the site, you need to set up an Xperience project.

Xperience provides .NET project templates you can install via the .NET command-line tool (included with the .NET SDK).

A template is a great place to start because it comes with:

• all required Xperience NuGet package dependencies
• the startup class, configured according to Xperience requirements (registered services and middleware)
• automatic database connection configuration

Install the Xperience project templates package

Run the following command in your command line prompt:

dotnet new install kentico.xperience.templates::29.3.0 --force

You should see an output showing you have successfully installed three project templates on your computer:

Create a project

Let’s use the Boilerplate template (kentico-xperience-mvc) to create an empty project called Kickstart.Web.

Navigate to your desired project directory and add the following folder structure: ~/src/Kickstart.Web.

Navigate to the Kickstart.Web directory in your command line tool and create your new project:

dotnet new kentico-xperience-mvc -n Kickstart.Web

You will encounter the following prompt during the project creation:

Template is configured to run the following action: 
Description: Restore tools required for this project configuration.
Manual instructions: Run 'dotnet tool restore'
Actual command: dotnet tool restore
Do you want to run this action [Y(yes)|N(no)]?

Agree by typing Y.

After the successful run, you should see a new .NET project generated in your Kickstart.Web directory.

Add a solution

Adding a solution file will allow other projects to work in tandem with Kickstart.Web and keep things organized.

You can add a solution via the .NET CLI or using an IDE of your choice.

Assign a license

In the src directory, create a new folder called License.

Add a file called license.txt with the content of a valid localhost license key.

Connect the database

The last thing we need is to set up the database.

Run this command from the ~/src/Kickstart.Web directory:

dotnet kentico-xperience-dbmanager -- -s "<sql_server_name>" -a "kickstart" -d "Xperience.Kickstart" --license-file "..\License\license.txt"

In this example, we are using the following parameters:

• -s specifies the SQL server for the new database.
• -a sets the password for the administrator account.
• -d names the database in your SQL Server.
• --license-file specifies the path to a text file containing your license key.

That’s it for the installation process. You now have a basic project with a database on your machine.

Set up local hosting

When developing websites, you often need to build and test code changes quickly. For this reason, it’s helpful to have the site hosted locally on your machine. In this aspect, ASP.NET Core is very flexible, as it supports multiple hosting options.

We’ll use the Kestrel web server to host our application. Kestrel is cross-platform and comes included by default with .NET installations. To launch the installed website, execute the following command in the ~/src/Kickstart.Web directory:

dotnet run

You should see output similar to the following in the terminal:

info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[14]
      Now listening on: http://localhost:33328
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down.
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Hosting environment: Development
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Content root path: <path_to_project_directory>

Enter the URL from the second line into your browser (in our case, http://localhost:33328) to view your site.

When the site loads, you should see a message that says something like this:

The Kickstart.Web site has not been configured yet.

There’s not much to see yet, but we’ll get to that in the following steps. For now, you can take a look at the Xperience administration:

Add /admin to your site’s URL and sign in using the default administrator account and the password ‘kickstart’, as you specified when installing the project database.

Now, let’s continue with the next step, where you will learn how to create a reusable content type, an essential building block in developing multichannel experiences with Xperience by Kentico.