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An intro to the Nylas Quickstart Guide

4 min read
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This blog post uses the Nylas API V2 Quickstart guides. Take a look at your latest docs to see Nylas API V3 Quickstart guides updated to work with Nylas API V3.

In this blog post, we cover how to build using the quickstart guide. We’ll take a look at what is required to get started with Nylas. We recently discussed building using the Nylas Quickstart Guide on our LiveStream Coding with Nylas:

A brief overview of Nylas

The Nylas Communication APIs allows your users to connect with their Emails, Calendars and Contacts when using your application. Building communication rich features into your app allows users’ to access their communication data to do more.

Importance of the quickstart guide

We’ve recently rolled out quickstart guides as part of our commitment to improving our developer experience. The guides are found on the Nylas Dashboard. In this blog, we will walk through signing up for Nylas and going through a QuickStart Guide. Let’s jump right in!

Getting started with a quickstart guide

1. Setting up an account

First head over to Nylas.com and register to create an account or login.

2. Generating API keys

To start using the quickstart guide, we do not need to generate API keys! We can use the free tier available that comes with 5 connected accounts for free. And each quickstart guide comes with the Nylas API keys included, so you can download the run the code locally.

3. Selecting the right API

We’ve split up the quickstart guides based on different use cases, split by different APIs (i.e. email and calendar):

Go ahead and select a guide. For the rest of the blog post, we are going to use the read email quickstart guide.

4. Read email code sample

The guide is split into three sections (view image below):

  • App preview: This gives us an overview of what the guide is building
  • Build:
    • Set up code: A walkthrough of the frontend and backend code
    • Test: How to test the code to make sure it works
  • Launch app
    • Additional resources for building with Nylas and next steps for preparing the application for production

As you will see shortly, we provide quickstart code samples in all of our official Nylas SDKs: Python, Java, Node, and Ruby. Let’s focus on the Build section specifically and how we can run the code locally on our machine.

5. Set up your code

In this section, Set up your code, we go over and outline and describe what each section or code snippet does:

You can also switch to different back-end languages. As mentioned, we cover code in all our SDKs: Node, Python, Ruby, Java.

Think of this section as a recipe for adding Nylas to your application, all the steps and code is provided for you to copy and add to your application.

Alternatively, you can also click download app to run the application locally, let’s consider that next.

6. Download application

Clicking download app will save a version of the application locally on your computer. I’ve downloaded the Node.js application for read-email. You will receive an application with both a backend and frontend application:

7. Install packages

Before running the application, follow the available README.md for both frontend and backend and install the required packages by running npm install in both frontend and backend folders. 
Taking a look at the .env file, you will see the the Nylas API credentials are already downloaded. Be careful not to share these keys publicly or commit them to a remote repository.

8. Run quickstart guide locally

Let’s run the application locally. For the Node.js quick start guide, we can run npm start in both the frontend and backend folders to start the servers.

Now we have a quickstart guide running locally on our machine:

We can enter our email to connect using Nylas hosted authentication and start reading emails:

Now we’ve downloaded a quickstart guide and ran the code locally on our machine.

Build time!

You can sign up for Nylas for free and start building! Continue building with Nylas by exploring different quickstart guides, or by visiting our developer documentation.

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