| title: | Reintroducing Vals |
|---|---|
| description: | Vals have been rebuilt from the ground up to multiple files, folders, branches, and more |
| pubDate: | 2025-04-20T00:00:00.000Z |
| author: | Steve Krouse |
Today, we're reintroducing vals – the core primitive of Val Town – to support bigger projects and powerful collaborative workflows.
A val is a now collaborative folder of deployed code. Vals can be backend services, APIs, internal tools, crons, full-stack apps, websites, blogs – like this one you're reading – and so much more. New vals support:
- multiple files & folders
- branches
- local development
- multiple triggers (
HTTP,Cron,Email) - isolated environment variables
- pull requests
- short urls (
whatever-you-want.val.run)
We are unifying our two primitives – vals and projects – into a single primitive: the val – which will have best features of both.
Under the hood, vals are becoming projects. Once the migration is over, we will rename projects to vals. In short: legacy vals → projects → vals.
HTTP, Cron, and Email val types wil then be referred to as triggers. The Script type is going away; all JavaScript files will be runnable.
- April 24, 2025 – Today, we are announcing the changes & API deprecations. You can start manually upgrading your legacy vals, and integrating with our new API routes.
- April 30, 2025 – All remaining legacy vals will be auto-upgraded. Deprecated API routes become read-only.
- May 1, 2025 – Projects will be renamed to vals across our product and docs.
TODO
We will be upgrading all legacy vals to the new val infrastructure on April 25th, 2025. If you would like to upgrade early, you can do so by going to any of your legacy vals and clicking upgrade.
All Val Town Projects have automatically been upgraded to the new val format.
As a part of this change, we have deprecated our v1 API. Please refer to our v2 API Upgrade Guide on how to migrate over.
You can get started using vals by heading over to val.town and clicking new val.
We recommend starting from one of these templates:
- TODO
- TODO
- TODO
If you're entirely new to Val Town, when you sign up, we'll drop you into this starter val.
[ Note to self: in theory, we should just have to say, "Go make a val", and then the val interface should guide them to remix a template or something. ]