Install Webiny

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, make sure you have the following:

1. Node.js >=16
   • Node.js versions v16.0.0 or greater
   • If you don’t have Node.js installed, the easiest way to install it is by downloading the official binary
2. yarn ^1.22.21 || >=2
   • Webiny works with both yarn versions 1 (classic) and >=2 (berry)
   • for version 1 - 1.22.21 or later is required
3. AWS account and user credentials
   • in order to deploy Webiny, you must have a valid AWS account and user credentials set up on your system

Project Setup

Once you have all the prerequisites in place, we recommend creating a new Webiny project using create-webiny-project - a tool that sets everything up automatically for you. So, in your terminal of choice, run the following command:

From there, follow the on-screen setup instructions, which includes answering a couple of project-related questions, and doing your first deployment.

Pick Your Database

Webiny supports two storage types at the moment: DynamoDB and DynamoDB+Elasticsearch. Choose which ever suits your needs more. Please, keep reading to find out more about the storage types…

First Deployment

Once your new project has been created, it’s time to deploy it into your AWS account.

To do that, in your terminal, navigate to your project folder, and run the following command:

By executing this command, all of the project applications will first get built, and, along with needed cloud infrastructure resources, deployed into your AWS account.

Note that the first deployment can take up to 20 minutes! So, even though it might look nothing is happening in the terminal, please be patient and let the process finish. If something went wrong, an error will be shown.

Finally, once the deployment has been done, you are presented with the URL over which you can access your Admin Area, and finish the installation.

Admin Area - Installation Wizard

(click to enlarge)

Troubleshooting

Deploying my project takes a long time to finish.

We’re aware of this fact, and this is mainly because of the Amazon Elasticsearch Service. While other cloud infrastructure resources get deployed reasonably fast, this service can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes to become ready.

Unfortunately, this is a well-known issue for quite some time, and until the present, there haven’t been any positive improvements.

SubscriptionRequiredException: The AWS Access Key Id needs a subscription for the service

In some cases, upon deploying a new Webiny project, it’s possible for users to experience the following error being thrown in their terminal:

The following are some of the reasons why you might be receiving this error:

1. you didn’t verify your phone number
2. you didn’t verify your payment method
3. you didn’t select a support subscription (free or other)
4. if you created a brand new AWS account, it wasn’t yet processed on the AWS side

The account signup and verification process can be completed via https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup?type=resubscribe#/resubscribed.

Pulumi is throwing a syscall.loadsystemlibrary exception There could be various reasons why this error was thrown. But, if deploying from a Windows machine, we’ve seen that it could be caused by an anti-virus software that you might have installed on your machine. Our suggestion is to try to temporary disable it and see if that produces any positive outcome.

Newer Apple M1 devices

If you’re using a next-generation Apple M1 device, there is a chance you might run into problems while deploying your new Webiny project. For example:

This is probably due to the fact that the underlying software simply isn’t ready yet for the new M1-based OS you’re running. Based on this article, we’ve seen that doing the following export does resolve the shown issue in some cases:

Please try executing the command in your terminal, and run the deployment again. If this does not help, feel free to ask for additional help.