1.2 Build and change your own

Included from Basic tierassets

After this you can: create a project, an environment and an asset of your own, update a node, and know why deletion is a separate lesson.

Before you start — tick each one:

• Lesson 1.1 — Projects, environments, assets — and hosts (opschain learn 1.1)

In the GUI: the estate tree shows a node you create the moment the server records it, and its page carries the tab strip — Activity first, Properties and Settings last.

Lesson 1.1 walked an estate somebody else built. Now you build your own: a project, an environment beneath it and, if you have a template to pin, an asset. Every create is recorded by the server as an audit event — the Academy's build-an-estate exercise reads exactly those events and nodes back, so what you type here is what it checks.

1. Create a project

The path you give nodes create says what you are creating. Start with the project:

opschain nodes create acme --name "ACME Shop"

created project /projects/acme (01a1b3a0-…)

Two things to know before you type it:

• Every project holds everything. Environments running changes and workflows against git remotes, assets (templated nodes with their own action catalogs, pinned template versions and version history) directly under the project or under its environments, and entities. There is no project type to choose; whether you may create assets is decided by your licence's assets feature and limit, not by the project. (Older scripts that still pass --project-type keep working — the flag is accepted, noted on stderr and ignored.)
• Codes are immutable. The code is the last path segment, lowercase letters, digits and underscores; --name is the display name (defaults to the code) and can change later.

2. Create an environment

opschain nodes create acme/environments/dev --name "Development"

created environment /projects/acme/environments/dev (01a1b3a0-…)

The parent must already exist: the environment's path is the project's path plus /environments/<code>. List what you have so far:

opschain nodes list acme

PATH                             KIND         NAME         TEMPLATE  MAINTENANCE
/projects/acme                   project      ACME Shop    -         -
/projects/acme/environments/dev  environment  Development  -         -

3. Create an asset

Assets always need --template <code>:<version> — the template is where an asset's actions come from, and the version must already exist on the server:

opschain nodes create acme/environments/dev/assets/web --template web-template:1.0.0

created asset /projects/acme/environments/dev/assets/web (01a1b3a0-…)

If you have no template version yet, skip this step and come back after lesson 3.4 creates one — the project and the environment are what the Academy exercise asks for. If your licence does not carry the assets feature, or its asset limit is reached, the server refuses by name and tells you exactly what to do, for example:

assets require an enterprise licence with the "assets" feature — the basic licence does not include it (opschain admin licence apply)

Prefer files for repeatable setups: -f node.yaml supplies the same attributes (name, description, template_code, template_version), with flags winning over file values.

4. Update a node

nodes update sends only what you supply — everything else keeps its stored value:

opschain nodes update acme --description "ACME online shop estate"

updated project /projects/acme

opschain nodes update acme/environments/dev --archived=true
opschain nodes update acme/environments/dev/assets/web --template-version 1.1.0

--archived hides a node from day-to-day work without destroying anything (nodes list shows it with an (archived) suffix), and --archived=false brings it back. --template-version repoints an asset to another version of its own template — the everyday upgrade move.

5. What about deleting?

Deliberately not here. Deleting a node destroys its whole subtree, so it lives with the administrative tooling rather than in the everyday nodes family — lesson 8.3 covers the decommission drill (export → delete → destroy) as an admin operation, and opschain docs cli/admin-nodes-delete is the verb.

Check yourself

• Do opschain nodes list and opschain properties show return exactly the two nodes and the one key your scenario named? The Academy's build-an-estate exercise reads api:projects:create then api:nodes:create for the environment, and the property it asked for on the project.
• After nodes create, what is the full path of the environment you created, and what does nodes list print in its KIND column for it?
• Verified version: opschain academy runs the build-an-estate exercise against this lesson.

What you learned

• nodes create <path> creates whatever the path names; the parent must exist and the last segment becomes the immutable code.
• Every project holds environments, assets and entities; an asset needs a --template <code>:<version> that exists and a licence carrying the assets feature.
• nodes update sends only what you supply; archiving hides a node without destroying anything.
• Deletion is an administrative drill in lesson 8.3, not an everyday verb.

Next: lesson 1.3 — Properties and settings: the overlay (opschain learn 1.3), or back to your track (opschain learn).