First project.

A project is a folder on your disk. Everything inside it — notebooks, dashboards, connection profiles, outputs — lives locally until you publish.

Create it

  1. Open Orchid. You'll land on the project shelf.
  2. Click New project.
  3. Pick a folder anywhere on your machine. Orchid uses the folder name as the project name.
  4. The IDE opens with an empty notebook ready to edit.
Existing folder

You can point Orchid at any existing folder. It won't touch files outside .orchid/ and the notebooks you create.

What's in a project

After a few minutes of work, a typical project looks like:

my-analysis/
├ analysis.orchid
├ revenue.orchid
├ q3.orchid-dashboard
└ .orchid/
├ project.yaml
├ connections/
└ outputs/
  • *.orchid — your notebooks. YAML, diff-friendly.
  • *.orchid-dashboard — your dashboards. YAML grid of tiles bound to notebook blocks.
  • .orchid/project.yaml — project metadata (name, slug, Python version).
  • .orchid/connections/ — connection profiles (no credentials; those live in your OS keychain).
  • .orchid/outputs/ — large cell outputs spilled to disk so notebooks stay diff-friendly.

Version control

Run git init in the project folder and commit. Notebooks are plain YAML, so git diffs are readable and merges are sensible. The .orchid/outputs/ folder is gitignored by default; pin it back in if you want outputs versioned alongside source.

What's next

Connect a source and write your first query.