The first step in creating a stack is deciding where it will reside. This location will be the stack's container.

Open an archive and choose File > New > Stack from the menu.

In the new stack dialog, choose the type of container you want to use. In the initial beta, there are three container types:

? A filesystem document
? An Amazon Web Services S3 bucket
? A bucket on a third-party S3-compatible service

Choose the type via the pop-up menu.

If you selected a document container, there's nothing more to configure at this point.

If you selected an AWS S3 container, you'll need to supply your server region, account identifier, the account's secret key (which Amazon supplied to you when you created the bucket), and finally the name of the bucket.

If you're using a third-party S3 container, you'll need to supply much of the same information as an AWS account along with an endpoint. If your services uses the standard Amazon convention for an S3 URL (i.e. https://s3.some-region-1.some-server.com/), then enter the region (some-region-1) and the server's domain name (some-server.com) in the two fields. If not, select the "endpoint" option and enter the entire base URL (i.e. "https://data-collection.oceanic-sci.princeton.edu/")



That was the hard part.

Now click the Next button to pick the name of your stack. In the case of a document stack, this will determine both its name and location. For S3 stacks, it will query the bucket, list the names of any existing stacks, and then prompt you to name the new one.

Click the Create button and, if all goes well, a new stack will be created and connected to your archive.

In the archive toolbar, click the Stacks view in the right sidebar, and then expand the details of your new stack; or click the action button to the right of the stack's title and choose "Edit in Separate Window?".



A description of the stack's container is displayed.

You can assign your stack a custom name that will appear in actions and the log.

There are also additional settings, which may vary depending on the type of containter.

You are now ready to seed your stack with layers from the archive. See the post "Updating a Stack" to get started, and for an explination of those other settings.