When I decided I wanted to make a Shortcuts utility app, I downloaded Apple’s Shortcuts demo project ‘Soup Chef’ to try and figure it all out.

It's a really excellent demo project, full of all the functionality that can be used to make complex shortcut actions, but since I was just starting out, I found it overwhelming how much was in there.

There weren’t a great deal of articles to help learn the basics from scratch - especially in a SwiftUI project - so I thought I would write my own to help anyone else looking to do the same.

My intention with this series of posts is to take you from a new project right through to adding complex shortcuts, step by step. I'd suggest reading this tutorial and then moving on to the Soup Chef project to learn more about using frameworks, storing data between your intent extension and your main app and how to localise your shortcut actions.

The completed project we’re building is available in full on GitHub and I’ll be updating it as I release each post.