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Your First 15 Minutes

Fifteen minutes. Zero explanations. You run commands, you see results, you know whether Wheels fits your brain. If it does, move on to the full tutorial — that’s where you’ll actually learn how things work.

You’ll learn:

Whether Wheels feels right for you
What a scaffolded Wheels app looks like
Where to go next

1. Create an app (3 min)

First, confirm the CLI is installed:

wheels --version

Then create a new app:

wheels new hello
cd hello

This creates a SQLite-backed Wheels app called hello and drops you into its directory. The scaffold takes a couple of seconds.

2. Start the server (2 min)

wheels start

You’ll see log lines ending with something like Server started successfully. Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser. A welcome page appears: “Welcome to hello. Your Wheels application is running.”

The dev server stays running in the background. Leave the terminal open.

3. Add a page (5 min)

Open config/routes.cfm. You’ll see a mapper()...end() block wrapped in <cfscript>. Inside mapper(), add a line so the file looks like:
```
mapper()
    .get(name="greet", pattern="/greet", to="main##greet")
    .wildcard()
    .root(to="main##index", method="get")
.end();
```
.get(...) declares: when a GET request hits /greet, run the greet action on the Main controller.

Open app/controllers/Main.cfc and add a greet action:

component extends="Controller" {
    function index() {
    }
    function greet() {
    }
}

Wheels renders the view at app/views/main/greet.cfm.

Create app/views/main/greet.cfm:

<h1>Hello from Wheels</h1>
<p>This page didn't exist a minute ago.</p>

Tell Wheels to pick up the changes:
your shell
```
wheels reload
```

4. Verify (2 min)

curl -s http://localhost:8080/greet

You should see <h1>Hello from Wheels</h1> in the response.

5. What just happened (3 min)

Three pieces moved:

Route — routes.cfm mapped a URL to a controller action. URL lookup is convention-driven; /greet → main##greet means “the greet function on the Main controller.”
Controller — Main.cfc’s greet action ran. It did nothing visible; it just existed, so Wheels proceeded to render the view.
View — app/views/main/greet.cfm rendered. The path is conventional: views/<controller>/<action>.cfm.

That’s it. Every request is a variant of the same three-beat dance: route, controller action, view. The full tutorial fills in models, migrations, forms, validations, and the rest.

Where to next

Build a Blog The real introduction — 7 parts, 3.5 hours, builds a complete app.

Core Concepts The mental model: request lifecycle, MVC, ORM philosophy.

CLI Reference Every command in the wheels CLI.