Getting Started

Welcome to Redakt, and thank you for trying out our product!

This guide is your starting point for setting up and configuring a Redakt-based application from scratch. It mainly serves as a reference overview and links to other guides for more detailed setup instructions. If you've already completed parts of the getting started guide, you can skip to the sections that are relevant for you.

Get a Redakt license

If you haven't done so already, get a Redakt license from the Redakt Customer Portal. You can purchase or trial a Premium License, or get a free Community License. Once you have a valid license, you can copy the license key from the Customer Portal into your project's app settings or enter it in the back office when you first run your project.

Setup infrastructure resources

When starting the development of your Redakt application, you should already have an idea of which infrastructure services and resources you will use for it. Redakt has a very flexible modular architecture and contains many data and service integration modules for popular cloud providers and databases, including Azure, Amazon AWS, and Mongo DB. Redakt can be configured for single-instance on-premises installations all the way to load-balanced, distributed, and scalable cloud setups. Check out the module list for a complete overview, or see typical hosting scenarios for common combinations of modules.

The rest of this guide assumes that you have set up and configured any services and resources that you wish to use for your Redakt application.

Project Setup

To create your first Redakt project, follow the separate project setup guide. After completing this guide, you will have a working Redakt project that is configured for single-instance operation, with a local file embedded database (Lite DB). Alternatively, you can start out with one of the skeleton projects.

Once this is done, you should configure your project to connect to the services and resources that you have set up in the previous section. If you haven't done so already as part of the project setup guide, continue with the module configuration guide to set up the required modules for your hosting scenario. If you are only trying out Redakt at this moment, the basic (LiteDB-based) project setup works well and you don't have to configure anything else.

After you are done with the project setup, you can run your project for the first time. The database will be initialized, and you will go through the first-time setup wizard. The rest of this guide assumes that you have successfully configured your Redakt project to connect to your chosen services and resources.

Content modelling

Although your Redakt project now successfully starts up, it doesn't contain any content models yet. Content models are required to do anything meaningful with the system. They define which properties and data can be managed on your website pages and assets by content authors. Continue with the content model implementation guide to create your Redakt content models.

The skeleton projects do already contain several basic content models that you can use as a reference.

View design

Now that you have created your content models, Redakt needs to know how to render them. This is done by creating standard ASP.NET Core Razor views. Check out the view implementation guide for instructions on how to create Redakt page views. If you plan to consume Redakt content through the Content Delivery API only, you don't need to create any server-size views.

After you have created some views, your application is ready for use. You can now start adding pages and content through the Redakt back office.

Deploying your application

At this point, you should have a fully functional Redakt application up and running. Deploying your application is nothing special, and is done through industry-standard DevOps practices. You can deploy manually or use a build server. Redakt can be deployed on any service that can run .NET 5 applications, including container solutions such as Docker.