---
slug: /learn/101-basics
---

# Dagger 101: basic usage

In this guide, you will learn the basics of Dagger by interacting with a pre-configured environment.
Then you will move on to creating your own environment from scratch.

Our pre-configured environment deploys a simple [React](https://reactjs.org/)
application to a special hosting environment created and managed by us, the Dagger team, for the purpose of this tutorial.
This will allow you to deploy something "real" right away, without having to configure your own infrastructure first.

In later guides, you will learn how to configure Dagger to deploy to your own infrastructure. And, for advanced users,
how to share access to your infrastructure in the same way that we are sharing access to ours now.

## Before we start

First, you'll need to make sure [you have installed dagger on your local machine](/install).

## Let's deploy our first application

**Step 1**: Clone the example repository

```shell
git clone https://github.com/dagger/examples.git
```

**Step 2**: Go the todoapp directory

`todoapp` is a simple Todo-list application written in Javascript using React.

Go to the app directory:

```shell
cd ./examples/todoapp
```

**Step 3**: Decrypt the inputs

The example app contains encrypted secrets and other pre-configured inputs, here is how to decrypt them:

```sh
dagger input list || curl -sfL https://releases.dagger.io/examples/key.txt >> ~/.config/dagger/keys.txt
```

**Step 4**: Deploy!

```shell
dagger up
```

At the end of the deploy, you should see a list of outputs. There is one that is named `url`. This is the URL where our app has been deployed. If you go to this URL, you should see your application live!

## Change some code and re-deploy

This repository is already configured to deploy the code in the directory `./todoapp`, so you can change some code (or replace the app code with another react app!) and re-run the following command to re-deploy when you want your changes to be live:

```shell
dagger up
```

## Under the hood

This example showed you how to deploy and develop on an application that is already configured with dagger. Now, let's learn a few concepts to help you understand how this was put together.

### The Environment

An Environment holds the entire deployment configuration.

You can list existing environment from the `./todoapp` directory:

```shell
dagger list
```

You should see an environment named `s3`. You can have many environments within your app. For instance one for `staging`, one for `dev`, etc...

Each environment can have different kind of deployment code. For example, a `dev` environment can deploy locally, a `staging` environment can deploy to a remote infrastructure, and so on.

### The plan

The plan is the deployment code, that includes the logic to deploy the local application to an AWS S3 bucket. From the `todoapp` directory, you can list the code of the plan:

```shell
ls -l .dagger/env/s3/plan/
```

Any code change to the plan will be applied during the next `dagger up`.

### The inputs

The plan can define one or several `inputs` in order to take some information from the user. Here is how to list the current inputs:

```shell
dagger input list
```

The inputs are persisted inside the `.dagger` directory and pushed to your git repository. That's why this example application worked out of the box.

### The outputs

The plan defines one or several `outputs`. They can show useful information at the end of the deployment. That's how we read the deploy `url` at the end of the deployment. Here is the command to list all inputs:

```shell
dagger output list
```

## What's next?

At this point, you have deployed your first application using dagger and learned some dagger commands. You are now ready to [learn more about how to program dagger](/learn/102-dev).