Create your first Fabric app

Fabric apps helps you build and ship backend services faster by providing ready-to-use infrastructure for authentication, data persistence, and static hosting. This quickstart shows you how to create your first app in Fabric.

Prerequisites

Enable Fabric app in tenant admin settings

A Fabric tenant administrator must enable the Fabric app workload before users can create Rayfin items. If you are not a tenant admin, contact your organization's Fabric administrator to complete this step.

  1. Sign in to the Fabric admin portal.
  2. Navigate to Tenant settings.
  3. Under Fabric apps (preview), toggle the setting to Enabled.
  4. Choose whether to enable it for the entire organization or specific security groups.
  5. Select Apply.

Changes may take a few minutes to propagate. After the setting is enabled, users in the allowed scope can create Fabric apps in their workspaces.

From nothing to a running app

Create and run a Fabric app with four commands. Rayfin deploys your backend to Microsoft Fabric, and you run your frontend locally against it. You don't run the backend locally.

npm create @microsoft/rayfin@latest my-app
cd my-app
npx rayfin up
npm run dev

Run npx rayfin up status to confirm the backend deployment.

Let an agent create the app

Copy the following prompt into GitHub Copilot or another coding agent that has access to a terminal:

Set up a new Rayfin app for me, end to end.

Rayfin is a backend platform for TypeScript developers on Microsoft Fabric. Before writing
any code, read https://rayfin.ai/docs/reference/agent-rules.md. Every page on that site is
available as raw Markdown by appending .md to its URL.

Then do the work yourself rather than printing steps for me:
1. Scaffold a project with `npm create @microsoft/rayfin@latest my-app` and install dependencies.
2. Sign in with `npx rayfin login`.
3. Deploy with `npx rayfin up` and confirm it with `npx rayfin up status`.
4. Start the frontend with `npm run dev` and tell me the URL to open.

Review the generated files and command output before you deploy the app.

Create an app from portal

Open Fabric in your browser and sign in with your Microsoft account.

Select a workspace

After signing in, select a workspace from the left navigation panel. If you do not have an existing workspace, create one:

  1. Select Workspaces in the left navigation.
  2. Select New workspace.
  3. Enter a name for the workspace and select Fabric capacity.

Create a new Fabric app

  1. In the workspace view, select New item.
  2. Search for App in the item type list or scroll to find it.
  3. Select App item to open the creation dialog.
  4. Enter a name for your Fabric app (for example, my-rayfin-app).
  5. Select Create.

Open, edit, and deploy your app

You can develop locally using Rayfin CLI.

  1. Open a terminal of your choice.

  2. Use the CLI command script shown in the portal and run in your terminal to download the app locally.

    Example

    npm create @microsoft/rayfin@latest -- "<appitemname>" --template todoapp --workspace <workspacename>

  3. Go to the project directory.

    cd <your project directory>

  4. Customize your app by editing the code directly or with the help of GitHub Copilot.

  5. Test local changes with your Fabric backend with the command.

    npm run dev

  6. Publish your changes with:

    npx rayfin up

    To deploy to another workspace, you can provide the --workspace parameter.

    npx rayfin up --workspace <workspacename>

    To switch between these two workspaces , run npx rayfin switch --workspace <workspace>.

Next steps

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