Quick Start

You’ll ship a running Wheels app with one CRUD resource — a blog post with a title and body — wired through model, controller, views, migration, tests, and routes.

This page assumes wheels --version already works. If it doesn’t, run through Installation first.

1. Create the app

From wherever you keep projects:

wheels new myblog --no-open-browser

wheels new scaffolds a fresh project directory named myblog with SQLite pre-wired as the zero-config datasource. The --no-open-browser flag skips the “pop open http://localhost:8080 once the server is ready” behavior — useful when you want to drive things manually.

Equivalent forms

wheels new myblog and wheels create app myblog and wheels generate app myblog all reach the same code path. Use whichever reads more naturally.

2. Start the server

example

cd myblog
wheels start

The dev server binds to port 8080 by default and runs in the background — the command returns once the server is up, leaving your terminal free. Stop it later with wheels stop. On first boot the wrapper resolves dependencies and compiles the application; subsequent starts are quick.

Override the port with --port=3000 if 8080 is busy.

3. Generate a scaffold

Back in the same terminal (the server is already running in the background), generate the resource:

wheels generate scaffold Post title:string body:text

This generates the full CRUD stack — a Post model, Posts controller with seven actions, index/show/new/edit views, a CreatePosts migration with title (string) and body (text) columns, a test spec, and a resource route. Attribute syntax is name:type — types map to the Wheels migration column types (string, text, integer, boolean, decimal, datetime, date, time).

The `g` alias

wheels generate has a shorthand: wheels g scaffold Post title:string body:text. This page uses the full form for clarity; the alias is fine in day-to-day work.

4. Run the migration

illustrative — requires running server

wheels migrate latest

This applies every pending migration — here, the CreatePosts migration the scaffold just wrote. Other subcommands: wheels migrate up (run the next migration), wheels migrate down (roll back one), wheels migrate info (show current state).

5. View the result

Open http://localhost:8080/posts in your browser. You should see the Posts index view — empty at first. Click “New Post”, create a record, and the full CRUD flow — list, show, edit, delete — is live against the SQLite database.

If you changed the port in step 2, substitute that port instead.

6. Run the scaffold’s tests

With the server still running in the background:

illustrative — requires running server

wheels test posts

The trailing positional is a directory scope, not a filename match — posts expands to tests.specs.posts. The scaffold generated PostSpec.cfc under tests/specs/models/ and PostsControllerSpec.cfc under tests/specs/controllers/, so on a fresh scaffold the posts scope matches neither directory and the run reports 0 passed. Use wheels test models or wheels test controllers to scope to the generated specs — though note that plain wheels test also reports 0 passed here, because the generated specs are empty describe stubs until you write expectations into them. A run with failing or erroring specs exits non-zero; a run with no failures exits 0.

7. What’s next

Code Generation The full catalog — models, controllers, views, migrations, scaffolds, API resources, routes, tests, admin, snippets.

Database wheels migrate, wheels seed, and wheels db — schema management and seed data workflows.

Testing wheels test options, the browser suite, and CI reporters.

Dev Server wheels start, wheels stop, wheels reload — running your app locally and driving hot reload.

Common next steps

Authentication

The scaffold gives you CRUD, not a login flow. See Authentication Patterns for cookbook-style recipes — session-based, token-based, and third-party OAuth — that drop onto the scaffold you just generated.

Configuration

To swap SQLite for a real database, tune the reload password, or wire per-environment settings, see Configuration and the Database guide. The datasource name defaults to the app name (myblog) and lives in config/settings.cfm.

Deployment

The deployment story — Kamal-based single-command deploys to any VPS — lands in a later docs phase. For now: the app is a standard CFML application that runs on Lucee 6/7, Adobe ColdFusion 2018+, or BoxLang, so any host that speaks those runtimes will serve it. Concrete deployment guides are coming.