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Installation

This guide will help you get started in order to install Marten and its dependencies. Let's get started!

Install Crystal​

Marten is a Crystal web framework; as such Crystal must be installed on your system. There are many ways to install Crystal, but we'll only highlight what we think are the most common ones here for the sake of simplicity: using Homebrew (macOS or Linux) or the APT package manager (Ubuntu, Debian). Please refer to the official Crystal installation guide if these methods don't work for you.

Using Homebrew​

On macOS or Linux, Crystal can be installed using Homebrew (also known as Linuxbrew) by running the following command:

brew install crystal

Using APT​

On Ubuntu, Debian or any other Linux distribution using the APT package manager, Crystal can be installed by running the following command:

curl -fsSL https://crystal-lang.org/install.sh | sudo bash

Using pacman​

On ArchLinux and derivates you can install Crystal and the shards command line tool through Pacman:

sudo pacman -S crystal shards

Install a database​

Marten officially supports MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite3 databases. New Marten projects will use a SQLite database by default: this lightweight serverless database application is usually already pre-installed on most of the existing operating systems, which makes it an ideal candidate for a development or a testing database. As such, if you choose to use SQLite for your new Marten project, you can very probably skip this section.

Marten also has built-in support for PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and MySQL. Please refer to the applicable official documentation to install your database of choice:

Each database necessitates the use of a dedicated shard (a package of Crystal code). If you're just beginning with the framework or planning to follow the tutorial, there's no immediate need to install these shards. However, if you intend to employ other databases like MariaDB, MySQL, or PostgreSQL, you may need to install database-specific shards. You can find instructions on how to do this in the Configure database backends section.

Install Marten​

The next step is to install the Marten CLI. This tool will let you easily generate new Marten projects or applications.

Using Homebrew​

On macOS or Linux, Marten can be installed using Homebrew (also known as Linuxbrew) by running the following commands:

brew tap martenframework/marten
brew install marten

Using AUR on ArchLinux and derivates​

Assuming you use some AUR helper (yay in this example) it will be as simple as:

yay -S marten

Once the installation is complete, you should be able to use the marten command:

marten -v

From the sources​

Marten can be installed from the sources by running the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/martenframework/marten
cd marten
shards install
crystal build src/marten_cli.cr -o bin/marten
mv bin/marten /usr/local/bin

Once the above steps are done, you should be able to verify that the marten command works as expected by running:

marten -v

Next steps​

Congrats! You’re in.

You can now move on to the introduction tutorial.