Launch-Ready Strong Init

[stopachka]

This gets strong init ready for prime time launch!

Try it out

Start by reading the docs, and follow the getting started examples:

https://instant-www-js-st1-jsv.vercel.app/docs

I went ahead and published an experimental version: 0.17.0-experimental.5. All the tutorials will include this tag :)

The PR

1. Update CLI, so init works without login

If the user wasn't logged in, npx instant-cli used to break. This led to a poor initial user experience.

I updated the command so if we aren't logged in, we prompt the user to log in and continue on.

2. Make init_experimental the default

I went ahead and all packages, so the strong init path is now the only path.

What this means for users

If a user was using normal init:

import { init } from '@instantdb/react'; 

const db = init({ appId })

Upgrading to 0.17.0 will be seamless. However, if they used to use a schema:

// Before
import { init } from '@instantdb/react'; 

type Schema = { ... } ;
const db = init<Schema>({ appId })

They'll need to do a one line change:

// After
import { init, BackwardsCompatibleSchema } from '@instantdb/react'; 

type Schema = { ... } ;
const db = init<BackwardsCompatibleSchema<Schema>>({ appId })

3. Update our docs UI

Our docs UI was feeling a bit cluttered:

• The "On this page" sidebar was broken for many pages
• The scrollbar always showed up
• Links were jarringly bold
• The layout width would change as you navigated different pages.

I made it so:

• The "On this page" sidebar is a fixed width, and it looks okay
• There are fewer bold colors
• The layout width does not change

Here's how it looks now:

4. Support for ansi rendering

I wanted to paste in what a CLI result looked like. This is a bit of a hack, but I added a custom ansi tag in our markdoc. It's a bit of process, but we can share the CLI output in the docs like so:

5. Docs updates

I went through every page of the docs, and did updates:

1. Updated our getting started examples
2. Updated "Modeling Data", to use our schema file
3. Updated InstaQL and InstaML, to include typesafety information
4. Updated a bunch of other files, as I went through the docs one by one

6. Fixes "next page" and "previous page" in our intro sections

In our docs, when you were on the "Getting Started in React" page:

If you looked, the "Next Page" would be "Getting started in React Native".

But in reality, you would want the next page to be "Init".

I updated it so:

1. The "next page" from the getting started sections all point to init
2. The "previous page" from init jumps back to getting started with react

7. Temporarily Update docs to use 0.17.0-experimental.3

I wanted to make it easy for you to test the latest version, so included the tag on all instructions in the docs. I will remove that commit when we are ready to ship.

---

@nezaj @dwwoelfel @tonsky

[github-actions]

View Vercel preview at instant-www-js-st1-jsv.vercel.app.

[dwwoelfel]

LGTM!

Some thoughts as I went through the example:

1. The next link on the react docs page goes to "React native" instead of "Working with data"

2. It would be nice if you didn't have to provide an empty object for links and rooms if you're not using those. The types will fail if you leave out rooms, but if you leave out links, we'll throw a unhelpful "TypeError: Cannot convert undefined or null to object" error.