Once you know the basics of Instant, you may find it useful to be able to quickly scaffold a new Instant project. We built create-instant-app to do just that.

We currently offer templates for Next.js, Expo, and Vanilla Typescript. Follow the quick start below to give it a spin!

Quick start

To scaffold a brand new Instant project, fire up your terminal and run the following command to go through the scaffolding prompts.

npx create-instant-app instant-demo
cd instant-demo

Once you complete the prompts create a new app and add your app ID to the .env file:

NEXT_PUBLIC_INSTANT_APP_ID=<YOUR_APP_ID_HERE>

Run the dev server to see your new app in action!

npm run dev

Huzzah! 🎉 You now have a brand new Instant project to play around with!

One-shot with Claude Code

Got Claude Code? You can use it to one-shot a full-stack Instant app!

Use create-instant-app with the --ai flag and you'll be prompted to describe the app you want to build. Give it a try!

npx create-instant-app --ai

You can think of this as a one-shot app builder in the terminal. If you use vercel you can even deploy your app by simply running vercel in the project.

Right now this only works with the Next.js template, but we plan to expand it to Expo and Vanilla TS soon. We're keen to improve this feature so if you have any feedback please let us know below or on Discord!