The First Kotlin App¶

Helpful Resources

I am assuming you already have the relevant Kotlin development environments (IDE and CLI) setup. If not, my Setup: Your Development Environments post is worth scanning first.

All set? Let's go!

Using: Kotlin CLI¶

CLI Tutorial Walkthrough

I followed the CLI tutorial with a minor adaptation in message. You can find the code on GitHub

// Filename: code/100days/001-hello.kt
fun main() {
    println("Hello, Kotlinverse!!")
}

Now open your terminal of choice, change to the code directory, and let's go exploring! First we need to compile the source code using kotlinc, the command-line Kotlin compiler.

$ cd code/100days
$ kotlinc ./001-hello.kt  -d hello.jar
$ ls
001-hello.kt    hello.jar

This generates the classic JAR file familiar to Java developers. You can use the jar command to peek into the generated archive and identify generated classes.

$ jar -tvf hello.jar 
META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
_001_helloKt.class
META-INF/main.kotlin_module

Now run the code using the kotlin command with the class name identified above.

1 2	`$kotlin -classpath hello.jar _001_helloKt Hello, Kotlinverse!!`

Or, if you are familiar with Java - this is a standard jar file with a defined entry point, so you can also just do this:

1 2	`$java -jar hello.jar Hello, Kotlinverse!!`

Under The Hood: hello.jar

If you're curious about what's in a jar file, you can unpack it using:

$jar xvf hello.jar 
inflated: META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
inflated: _001_helloKt.class
inflated: META-INF/main.kotlin_module

The MANIFEST.MF file gives you all the information you need, to figure out what the entry point or Main-Class for this archive is. This is what mine looks like - and clearly identifies _001_helloKt as the entry point.

$ cat META-INF/MANIFEST.MF 
Manifest-Version: 1.0
Created-By: JetBrains Kotlin
Main-Class: _001_helloKt

Using: VS Code + CLI¶

Option 1: Use VSCode + CodeRunner

Type F1 to get the commands selector, then select Run Code to activate the extension. It should open up a built-in terminal and produce output like this:

[Running] cd "/Users/nitya/Documents/GitHub/kotlin-fyi/code/100days/" && kotlinc 001-hello.kt -include-runtime -d 001-hello.jar && java -jar 001-hello.jar

Hello, Kotlinverse!!

[Done] exited with code=0 in 3.145 seconds

Option 2: Use VSCode Terminal manually

If you're a Java developer, the syntax and approach will be very familiar. In fact, if you look at the output of the code runner above, you can spot the commands it uses, to execute the built/run sequence! Or refer to the Using CLI section for the standard terminal commands.

To open the built-in Terminal in VS Code, you can use the "Cmd + `" shortcut on the Mac. There might be other shortcuts available for different environments.

Using: IntelliJ IDEA¶

Next, let's explore the richer tooling of IntelliJ IDEA to create a new application (from scratch), and also to work with existing code like the sample above.

How can we create a new project?

I started with the Getting Started with IntelliJ IDEA tutorial, building a HelloKotlinverse application using the Console Application template and default configurations. You can also read the IntelliJ Guide for more options and details.

By default, your project uses the Gradle build system with Kotlin DSL. If you open the default boilerplate project, you will see this distribution:

.gradle/
.idea/
build.gradle.kts
gradle/
    wrapper/
        gradle-wrapper.jar
        gradle-wrapper.properties
gradle.properties
gradlew
gradlew.bat
settings.gradle.kts
src/
    main/
        kotlin/
            main.kt
        resources/
    test/
        kotlin/
            main.kt
        resources/

The main file to look at right now is the src/main/kotlin/main.kt file which contains this code:

1
2
3

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
    println("Hello World!")
}

Yes - the exact code sample we used for exploring CLI usage is the default "Hello World" boilerplate code - except it declares the main function's accepted args parameter explicitly.

Change the code to send a different message - I went with Hello Kotlinverse! for mine - then click the Run (green arrow) in the gutter of your editor screen to run the code. You should see something like this (some output eliminated for clarity)

1:11:52 PM: Executing task 'MainKt.main()'...

Starting Gradle Daemon...
Gradle Daemon started in 815 ms
> Task :wrapper

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 4s
1 actionable task: 1 executed

> Task :compileKotlin
..
..
Hello Kotlinverse!

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 6s
2 actionable tasks: 2 executed
1:12:04 PM: Task execution finished 'MainKt.main()'.

And that's it! You've validated your IDE install and compiled your first app. In later sections we'll explore the purpose and usage of the various other files and settings in this IDE.

How can we import and work with existing projects?

The short answer is _"it depends!". You can import an existing IDEA project (e.g., move project to new environment), or create it from the source in a version control system, or create it from source files in your local directory.

Read this guide for more on all these options.

Summary¶

What we completed here:

verified our development environment is setup correctly
wrote the basic "Hello, World" equivalent in Kotlin
compiled and ran it from command-line (CLI)
setup and used the CLI from a different editor (VS Code)
imported and ran the code in the IntelliJ IDEA IDE
learned to build and run a new app using IntelliJ IDEA

The "Referenced Resources" section at the top of the page lists all the resources used in this segment.