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Author a project visually

For the concept of the project model (the kapi.yaml recipe, the state dir, discovery), see Projects and Your first project; this recipe walks creating and shaping one in Kapi Desktop.

Goal: stand up a project — its languages, content patterns, and flows — through the app, ending with the same committable kapi.yaml recipe you'd get from kapi init.

Outdated recording

The interface has changed since this was recorded. The workflow it demonstrates still applies, but some screens and labels differ from the current release. The project home now leads with the convergence hero and its active-model badge.

Video — retargeting needed

This clip is reused from the Kapi Desktop tour "create and manage a project" segment. It's close to on-message here (this recipe is the desktop-oriented "first project"), but TODO: retarget it to land as a start-to-finish "your first project in Kapi Desktop" — create → set languages → add content collections → see matched files — and trim the broader tour framing. Scene scripts: web/walkthroughs/.

Steps​

  1. Create the project. Choose a folder; the app writes a kapi.yaml recipe and the sibling .kapi/ state dir — the same layout kapi init produces.
  2. Declare languages. Pick the source language and the locales you translate into. These drive every flow's defaults.
  3. Group content into collections. Add glob patterns (docs, UI strings, contracts) as named collections. The project home shows the patterns alongside the real files they match and the format Kapi detected for each.
  4. Bind flows. Attach flows from the flow editor so the project runs them with its declared languages and defaults.
  5. Commit the recipe. The kapi.yaml recipe is portable YAML — commit it, and the project runs identically from the CLI and for teammates.

Why the desktop​

Visual authoring keeps the project's shape in view — which globs match which files, what format each is, which flows are bound — and validates as you go. The artifact is an ordinary kapi.yaml recipe: nothing is desktop-only, so the project is fully drivable from kapi on the command line and in CI.

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