Welcome to the Marten documentation!

Marten is a batteries-included web framework for Crystal. It provides a consistent and extensible set of tools for building complete web applications without reinventing the wheel.

Getting started

Are you new to the Marten web framework? The following resources will help you get started:

• The installation guide will help you install Crystal and the Marten CLI
• The tutorial will help you discover the main features of the framework by creating a simple web application
• Coming from Django? and Coming from Rails? map familiar concepts to Marten if you already know those frameworks
• Why Marten? compares Marten to other Crystal frameworks and helps you decide whether it is a good fit for your project

Browsing the documentation

The Marten documentation contains multiple pages and references that don't necessarily serve the same purpose. To help you browse this documentation, here is an overview of the different sorts of content you might encounter:

• Topic-specific guides discuss the key concepts of the framework. They provide explanations and useful information about things like models, handlers, and templates
• Reference pages provide a curated technical reference of the framework APIs
• How-to guides document how to solve common problems when working with the framework. Those can cover things like deployments, app development, etc

Additionally, an automatically-generated API reference is also available to dig into Marten's internals.