Installing Taxi and Orbital

This guide covers getting Taxi and Orbital running locally in a developer environment.

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Prerequisites

Before you get started, you’ll need the following:

• Docker and Docker Compose (installed by default with Docker)
• SDKMan - A fantastic tool for installing SDKs and developer tools
• VSCode - Optional, but we create dev tools for VSCode that improve the developer experience.

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Installing Taxi

Taxi is a language for describing data sources, and how data relates.

It’s CLI has tooling for creating projects and running builds.

First, lets install Taxi:

$ sdk install taxi

Downloading: taxi 1.42.0

In progress...

Installing: taxi 1.42.0
Done installing!

Setting taxi 1.42.0 as default.

Now running taxi should show the installed build:

$ taxi

Taxi 1.42.0 @7ebfab5 
Usage: taxi [options] [command] [command options] Main options

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Creating a new Taxi project

Create an empty directory, and run taxi init

$ mkdir orbital-demo
$ cd orbital-demo
$ taxi init

You’ll be prompted with questions about the project group, name, version and src:

Project group (eg., com.acme): com.demo
Project name: hello-world
Project version [0.1.0]: 
Source directory [src/]: 
Creating project com.demo/hello-world v0.1.0 in directory /dev/orbital-demo 
Writing config to /dev/orbital-demo/taxi.conf 
Generating source directory at /dev/orbital-demo/src 
Finished 

You now have an empty taxi project.

Open VSCode to take a look around:

$ code .

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Launching Orbital

Finally, let’s launch Orbital.

Taxi has a convenient command to launch a developer environment of Orbital, which is preconfigured to the current project:

$ taxi orbital

This downloads a docker-compose.yml file from start.orbitalhq.com, then runs docker compose up.

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Live reload

The devleoper environment of Orbital is configured with live reload, so any changes you make in your taxi project are automatically picked up and detected inside of Orbital

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Next Steps

That’s it! You’re now running Orbital locally, and have a brand new Taxi project ready to go.

Why not take one of our Guides for a spin, and build something locally.