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Revamp Readme for 1.0. (redwoodjs#4398)
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Streamlined the Readme and made it more relevant to today's Redwood and the imminent 1.0 release.
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mojombo authored Mar 1, 2022
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<h1 align="center">Redwood</h1>
</p>

_by Tom Preston-Werner, Peter Pistorius, Rob Cameron, David Price, and more than two hundred amazing contributors (see end of file for a full list)._

**Redwood is an opinionated, full-stack, serverless-ready web application framework
that will allow you to build and deploy with ease.**
Imagine a React frontend, statically delivered by CDN, that talks via GraphQL to
your backend running on AWS Lambdas (or containers) around the world, all deployable with just a
`git push`—that's Redwood. By making a lot of decisions for you, Redwood lets
you get to work on what makes your application special, instead of wasting
cycles choosing and re-choosing various technologies and configurations. Plus,
because Redwood is a proper framework, you benefit from continued performance
and feature upgrades over time and with minimum effort.

Redwood is the latest open source project initiated by Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub (most popular code host on the planet), creator of Jekyll (one of the first and most popular static site generators), creator of Gravatar (the most popular avatar service on the planet), author of the Semantic Versioning specification (powers the Node packaging ecosystem), and inventor of TOML (an obvious, minimal configuration language used by many projects).

> **NOTICE:** RedwoodJS is very close to a stable version 1.0. In the last two years,
> the project has matured significantly and is already used in production by a number
> of startups. We intend to have a 1.0 release candidate before the end of 2021 and
> to release a truly production-ready 1.0 in early 2022.
> **TUTORIAL:** The best way to get to know Redwood is by going through the extensive
> [Redwood Tutorial](https://redwoodjs.com/tutorial). Have fun!
> **QUICK START:** You can install and run a full-stack Redwood application on your
> machine with only a couple commands. Check out the [Quick Start](https://redwoodjs.com/docs/quick-start)
> guide to get started.
**EXAMPLES:** If you'd like to see some examples of what a Redwood application looks
like, take a look at the following projects:
_by Tom Preston-Werner, Peter Pistorius, Rob Cameron, David Price, and more than
250 amazing contributors (see end of file for a full list)._

**Redwood is an opinionated, full-stack, JavaScript/TypeScript web application
framework designed to keep you moving fast as your app grows from side project
to startup.**

At the highest level, a Redwood app is a React frontend that talks to a custom
GraphQL API. The API uses Prisma to operate on a database. Out of the box you
get tightly integrated testing with Jest, logging with Pino, and a UI component
catalog with Storybook. Setting up authentication (like Auth0) or CSS frameworks
(like Tailwind CSS) are a single command line invocation away. And to top it
off, Redwood's architecture allows you to deploy to either serverless providers
(e.g. Netlify, Vercel) or traditional server and container providers (e.g. AWS,
Render) with nearly no code changes between the two!

By making a lot of decisions for you, Redwood lets you get to work on what makes
your application special, instead of wasting cycles choosing and re-choosing
various technologies and configurations. Plus, because Redwood is a proper
framework, you benefit from continued performance and feature upgrades over time
and with minimum effort.

Redwood is the latest open source project initiated by Tom Preston-Werner,
cofounder of GitHub (most popular code host on the planet), creator of Jekyll
(one of the first and most popular static site generators), creator of Gravatar
(the most popular avatar service on the planet), author of the Semantic
Versioning specification (powers the Node packaging ecosystem), and inventor of
TOML (an obvious, minimal configuration language used by many projects).

> **NOTICE:** RedwoodJS is very close to a stable version 1.0. In the last two
> years, the project has matured significantly and is already used in production
> by a number of VC-backed startups. We are currently in the release candidate
> phase and intend to release a final v1.0.0 in March of 2022.
> **TUTORIAL:** The best way to get to know Redwood is by going through the
> extensive [Redwood Tutorial](https://redwoodjs.com/tutorial). Have fun!
> **QUICK START:** You can install and run a full-stack Redwood application on
> your machine with only a couple commands. Check out the [Quick
> Start](https://redwoodjs.com/docs/quick-start) guide to get started.
**EXAMPLES:** If you'd like to see some simple examples of what a Redwood
application looks like, take a look at the following projects:

- [Todo](https://github.com/redwoodjs/example-todo)
- [Blog](https://github.com/redwoodjs/example-blog)
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- API Server using [Fastify](https://www.fastify.io) for Serverful deploys
- First-class Jamstack-style deployment to both serverless and traditional infrastructure: [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/), [Vercel](https://vercel.com/), [Serverless](https://www.serverless.com/), [Render](https://render.com/), [Docker container](https://community.redwoodjs.com/t/dockerize-redwoodjs/2291) (for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.), and many more on the way!

## Roadmap

We intend to have a 1.0 release candidate before the end of 2021 and to release a truly production-ready 1.0 in early 2022.
To see all the features we plan on including in Redwood's first major release, you can check out our [Roadmap](https://redwoodjs.com/roadmap).

A framework like Redwood has a lot of moving parts; the Roadmap is a great way to get a high-level overview of where the framework is relative to where we want it to be. And since we link to all of our GitHub project boards, it's also a great way to get involved!

## The Redwood philosophy

Redwood believes that [Jamstack](https://jamstack.org/) architecture is a huge leap forward in how we can write web
applications that are easy to write, deploy, scale, and maintain.

Redwood believes that there is power in standards, and makes decisions for you
about which technologies to use, how to organize your code into files, and how to
name things. With a shared understanding of the Redwood conventions, a developer
should be able to jump into any Redwood application and get up to speed very
quickly.

Redwood believes that traditional, relational databases like PostgreSQL and
MySQL are still the workhorses of today's web applications and should be first-class
citizens. However, Redwood also shines with NoSQL databases like [FaunaDB](https://fauna.com/).

Redwood believes that, as much as possible, you should be able to operate in a
serverless mindset and deploy to a generic computational grid. This helps unlock
the next point...

Redwood believes that deployment and scaling should be super easy, whether deploying to serverless or traditional infrastructure. To deploy
your application, you should only need to commit and push to your Git
repository. To scale from zero to thousands of users should not require your
intervention. The principles of JAMstack and serverless make this possible.

Redwood believes that it should be equally useful for writing both simple, toy
applications and complex, mission-critical applications. In addition, it should
require very little operational work to grow your app from the former to the
latter.

Redwood believes that you can use JavaScript as your primary language on both
the frontend and backend. Using a single language simplifies everything
from code reuse to hiring developers.

## How it works

A Redwood application is split into two parts: a frontend and a backend. This is
represented as two node projects within a single monorepo. We use [Yarn](https://yarnpkg.com/) to make
it easy to operate across both projects while keeping them in a single
Git repository.
represented as two JS/TS projects within a single monorepo. We use
[Yarn](https://yarnpkg.com/) to make it easy to operate across both projects
while keeping them in a single Git repository.

The frontend project is called `web` and the backend project is called `api`.
For clarity, we will refer to these in prose as "sides", i.e. the "web side" and
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -156,32 +131,16 @@ because Redwood conceives of a world where you may have other sides like
"mobile", "desktop", "cli", etc., all consuming the same GraphQL API and living
in the same monorepo.

## How can it be serverless if it involves a GraphQL API and database?

I'm glad you asked! Currently, Redwood can deploy your GraphQL API to a Lambda
function. This is not appropriate for all use cases, but on hosting providers
like Netlify, it makes deployment a breeze. As time goes on, "functions" will
continue to enjoy performance improvements which will further increase the
number of use cases that can take advantage of this technology.

Databases are a little trickier, especially the traditional relational ones
like PostgreSQL and MySQL. Right now, you still need to set these up manually,
but we are working hard with Netlify and other providers to fulfill the
serverless dream here too.

Redwood is intentionally pushing the boundaries of what's possible with
JAMstack. In fact, the whole reason I (Tom) started working on Redwood is
because of a tweet I posted some time ago:

> Prediction: within 5 years, you’ll build your next large scale, fully featured
> web app with #JAMstack and deploy on @Netlify.
> [—@mojombo • 9 July 2018](https://twitter.com/mojombo/status/1016506622477135872)
## Roadmap

I kept waiting for a high quality full-stack framework to arrive, but it didn't,
so I decided to take matters into my own hands. And that's why Redwood exists.
We intend to release a truly production-ready 1.0 in early 2022. To see all the
features we plan on including in Redwood's first major release, you can check
out our [Roadmap](https://redwoodjs.com/roadmap).

If you are like minded, then I hope you'll join me in helping build Redwood and
hasten the arrival of the future I predicted!
A framework like Redwood has a lot of moving parts; the Roadmap is a great way
to get a high-level overview of where the framework is relative to where we want
it to be. And since we link to all of our GitHub project boards, it's also a
great way to get involved!

## Why is it called Redwood?

Expand Down

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