Quick Start

This quick start guide will help you get a full stack web application running in just a few minutes by leveraging amber’s code generators.

It will take us just 7 steps. Let’s get started!

1. Install dependencies

1.1 Install crystal and amber

Instructions for OS X using Homebrew or MacPorts and Debian/Ubuntu are below. See full installation instructions here for RedHat & CentOS, ArchLinux & Derivatives, and more complete instructions.

macOS

Installing Amber with these package managers also installs Crystal.

• Homebrew

  brew tap amberframework/amber
  brew install amber

• MacPorts

  sudo port selfupdate
  sudo port install amber

Ubuntu or Debian

First install crystal

curl https://dist.crystal-lang.org/apt/setup.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install build-essential crystal

Then install Amber (from source)

sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev libpq-dev libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libpcre3-dev libevent-dev
curl -L https://github.com/amberframework/amber/archive/stable.tar.gz | tar xz
cd amber-stable/
shards install
make install

You can also install Amber with Linuxbrew​

brew tap amberframework/amber
brew install amber

1.2 Install a database

Amber works with postgresql (default), mysql, or sqlite.

If you don’t already have one of these installed, please follow the guides provided by each database maintainer:

• ​Postgresql Installation Guides​

• ​MySQL Installation Guides​

• ​Tutorial on installing SQLite​

2. Generate a new Amber application

With all dependencies successfully installed, we can generate a new application with amber new

After the code for the new application is generated, we will cd into the new directory and execute a shards install.

The shards install command may take a little while - it has to download all shard dependencies.

amber new pet-tracker
cd pet-tracker

3. Generate a resource

With the skeleton application generated, we can generate our first RESTful resource.

The amber generate scaffold command will help us do this.

amber g scaffold Pet name:string breed:string age:integer

4. Create and migrate the database

Generating the application and the scaffolded resource provides the configuration and migration files needed to set up the database.

amber db will help us do this, as you will see you can chain the db commands together.

amber db create migrate

This will create a new database and run the migration to create a pets table with the specified columns.

5. Build the application and run the server

We can use amber watch to both build the binary application and start the server. Additionally, amber watch will detect code changes then recompile and restart the application automatically.

amber watch

The watch commands will keep observing for file changes within the project and recompiling the application.

6. Use your brand new web application!

Open any browser and goto http://localhost:3000 You should see a home page load and “Pets” in the nav bar. If you click on the “Pets” link, you should be able to perform all seven RESTful actions for the “pets” resource.

7. Deploy your web application

List of Commands

You can use these commands to create new awesome applications :-)

amber new pet-tracker
cd pet-tracker
shards install
amber generate scaffold Pet name:string breed:string age:integer
amber db create migrate
amber watch

Demo

Here is the Quick Start demo app and the source code is available on Github.