# Getting Started

Once you have successfully installed Meltano from the command line, you will need to create a project before you launch the Meltano UI.

# Create your first project

To initialize a new project, open your terminal and navigate to the directory that you'd like to store your Meltano projects in.

Use the meltano init command, which takes a PROJECT_NAME that is of your own choosing. For this guide, let's create a project called "myprojectname".

meltano init myprojectname

This will create a new directory named myprojectname in the current directory and initialize Meltano's basic directory structure inside it.

Inside the Meltano project directory, all plugin configuration (which may include tokens and passwords) is stored inside the .meltano directory, which is automatically added to the project's .gitignore file to prevent this potentially sensitive information from accidentally being pushed up to a hosted Git repository.

# Setup your loader

Self-hosted Meltano instances require you to set up a reporting database and configure Meltano to use it by installing a Loader.

Meltano has basic support for a few different loaders, but dashboards and reports are only supported with PostgreSQL.

You will find detailed instructions in the docs for your loader of choice.

# Start the application

Now that you've created your first Meltano project, let's change directory to our new project and start Meltano UI:

cd myprojectname
meltano ui

Meltano is now running and should open a new tab at http://localhost:5000.

Now that you have access to the Meltano UI, use our Getting Started with Data Analysis guide to learn more about how to use the software.