Chapter 4. Signing In and Creating Projects
Atlas uses a universal login system called Janrain, that lets you sign up for the system using login credentials from other social media sites. To sign in, click the sign in button on the homepage, and choose the account that you have tied to Atlas, or create new login credentials specifically for Atlas.
Atlas gives you a blank slate when you sign in for the first time, which means your next steps will be to create a project, or to import a project from GitHub.
Creating a New Project
A “project” is any collection of files that will be combined into a single output. For example, a book might be one project, a presentation might be another, or even a theme could be a project. Atlas makes it very easy to create new projects in your account. On the Projects listing page, simply click “New Project” to get the ball rolling.
You’ll get taken to a page where you can define the title and description for your project, and choose a project template to pre-populate your new repository with some skeleton files based on the kind of project you’re making. Learn more about project templates below.
Click “Create!”, and Atlas will add a new repository to your Atlas account, pre-populated with skeleton files based on the project template you chose.
Project Templates
To help you get a head start, we’ve created a few different project templates that you can choose from when creating a new project. These templates contain a handful of skeleton files and/or folders based on the kind of project you’re creating. For example, the “Book” template includes skeleton files for a titlepage, copyright page, preface, chapter, and appendix. The “Basic” template gives you just one chapter file and the required Chapter 8. If you want an absolutely naked, empty repository to start with, choose the “Bare” template.
Import from GitHub
If you have an existing project in GitHub that you want to import into Atlas, you can use the “Import from GitHub” tool. Click this button, authorize Atlas to access your GitHub account, and then you’ll see a list of your existing GitHub projects.
Figure 4-1. Before you can import a project from GitHub, you need to allow Atlas to access your GitHub account.
Click the “Import” button to the right of the project you want to add to Atlas. Atlas will let you know if it was able to successfully import your files, and will give you a link to get started writing and building.
Figure 4-2. Once a project is successfully imported, click the link to start editing.
Once you have some projects in Atlas, every time you sign in, you’ll see all your existing or imported projects listed here on the Projects page.
Select a project from the list and you’ll be taken to the project dashboard, where you’ll see a list of all files in the project, and have access to the “Building”.
A Warning About Split Source
When you import a project from GitHub into Atlas, you are essentially creating a copy of the files, that you will be maintaining separately from the files in GitHub. If you want to keep both sets of files up to date with the same changes, you’ll need to add your repositories as a remote on a local checkout. ???.