First Run & Onboarding
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The first time Orbit opens with no configuration, it runs a brand-styled onboarding flow that gets you from a blank window to a working, watched project. Onboarding is progressive: features reveal themselves as you reach the milestones that need them, so the early screens stay calm.
The welcome flow
Section titled “The welcome flow”The flow moves through a Welcome screen, a sign-in step (GitHub or Google OAuth), and a “Lift-off” hand-off into the dashboard. If you are joining through the alpha, the sign-in step gates on an invite code: the GitHub and Google buttons stay disabled until you enter one, and sign-in is rejected if the code turns out to be invalid. The Alpha Tester Guide is available any time from Settings → About.
Behind the scenes a small milestone state machine tracks where you are — whether you have built your first themed project, whether your icons are ready, and whether you have completed onboarding — and uses those flags to decide which parts of the interface to surface.
Setting up projects
Section titled “Setting up projects”The setup steps cover the essentials:
- Project folders. Point Orbit at one or more root folders. Multiple roots are supported.
- Project discovery. Orbit scans for the markers of a real project —
package.json, a.gitdirectory,orbit.json,Cargo.toml,pyproject.toml,go.mod— and lets you check the ones to add. Only the folder path is required; everything else takes a sensible default. - AI provider key (optional). Choose Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google and drop in a key, or skip. The key is stored in the Vault.
- Coding agent (optional). Orbit auto-detects Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI on your PATH, and can install and configure one for you if none is found. This step is skippable.
The guided first build
Section titled “The guided first build”If you follow the guided path, Apollo walks you through building a small starter project end to end: it asks a handful of customization questions, queues a theme build, and then generates and embeds app icons. Dashboard highlight markers point out where each piece lands, and your choices are saved so the rest of the interface can adapt to them.