Jelix is provided with a script, jelix.php, which makes creation and modification of the different files of an application based on Jelix easy. It is necessary to invoke it with the command line version of PHP and to give as parameter a Jelix command name, with possible parameters and options.

  php jelix.php [--application_name] command_name [options] [parameters]

For this, open a console and go to the lib/jelix-scripts/ directory where jelix.php is placed.

   cd lib/jelix-scripts/      # under linux
   cd lib\jelix-scripts\      # under windows

To get help on all the available commands, type :

   php jelix.php help

You will have noticed that you must indicate to jelix.php (except for the help command), the name of the application on which the command apply. It is possible to avoid it. For this, you have to put the name of the application in an environment variable : JELIX_APP_NAME. For our example, do this :

  export JELIX_APP_NAME="news.org"        # under linux
  set JELIX_APP_NAME=news.org             # under windows

Notice that you can execute the script from any directories. For example, you can type:

  php jelix/path/lib/jelix-scripts/jelix.php --news.org createapp   # under linux
  php jelix\path\lib\jelix-scripts\jelix.php --news.org createapp   # under windows

Let's begin to create our application. Jelix proposes a command for creating all the tree structure of an application : createapp. Type then :

php jelix.php createapp

You then get a news.org/ directory, at the same level as the lib/ directory. Its content is :

news.org/
   modules/      the modules owned by your application
   plugins/      the plugins owned by your application
   var/config/   the configuration files of your application
   var/log/      the eventual log files
   var/themes/   the different possible themes in your application
   var/overloads/ will contain the different files that you will have redefined, resulting from modules
   www/          the root of the site

Check that the temp/actu.org directory you have just created, has write permissions for the web server.

Now we have a skeleton of application, and we will have to create a module, because for the moment, our application can do nothing since there is no defined action. Indeed, we will have to declare and implement some actions. An action can be a page display, backup of a form, a webservice call, etc.

The actions are grouped into distinct modules according to the domain or the fonction to which they are linked. We will for example create a module which will group the actions meant to display and manage the news. To do that, you have the createmodule command, which takes as parameter the name of the module that will be created.

php jelix.php createmodule news

By typing this command, Jelix has created for you a module named news with all its tree structure and some mandatory files :

 news.org/modules/
            news/                the directory of the module
              module.xml          file discribing the identity of the module
              controllers/       the action processing classes.
                 default.classic.php   a controller
              classes/            your business classes and services
              daos/               the object-relationnal mapping files
              locales/            locale files ("properties" files)
                  en_EN/
                  fr_FR/
              templates/          templates of the module
              zones/              objects processing specific zones in a page

We are now ready to define the actions.