Create New App
Before we begin, please take a minute to read the Installation Guide. By installing any necessary dependencies beforehand, we’ll be able to get our application up and running smoothly.
At this point, we should have Crystal and Amber installed. We should also have PostgreSQL and NodeJS installed to build a default application.
To verify you have Amber installed, run the command
amber -v
in your terminal window:$ amber -v
Amber CLI (amberframework.org) - vX.Y.Z
To bootstrap your Amber application, run
amber new
with an absolute or relative directory path to the application directory it should create. Assuming that the name of your application is "weblog", let's run:$ amber new weblog
Additionally, the following options may be passed to the above command:
-d
This specifies the database driver to use. It defaults to pg, for PostgreSQL.-t
This specifies the template rendering engine. It defaults to slang, the Slim-inspired templating language.
Change your current directory to
weblog
, if that was the path you chose:cd weblog
Amber makes it easy to interact with your database. Amber supports Postgres, MySql, and Sqlite.
Edit the database setting for your current environment by editing the file:
{project_name}/config/environments/{current_environment}.yml
Amber looks at the
database_url
key for the default database connection string.Amber assumes that your PostgreSQL database will have a
postgres
user account with the correct permissions and no password set for this user. If that isn’t the case, update the database_url
key with the correct database credentials for your environment.With your database credentials ready, run the following command in your terminal window:
amber db create
This creates your application's Postgres database. It should output:
Created database weblog_development
And finally, we’ll start the Amber server:
amber watch
By default Amber accepts requests on port 3000. If we point our favorite web browser at http://localhost:3000, we should see the Amber Framework welcome page.

Oh, yeah!
If your screen looks like the image above, congratulations!
You now have a working Amber application. If you don’t see the page above, try accessing it via http://127.0.0.1:3000.
Locally, the application is running in a Crystal process. To stop it, we hit ctrl-c once, just as we would terminate the program normally.
The
amber watch
command watches for any changes in your source files, recompiling automatically. If you don't want this, you can compile and run manually:- 1.Build the app
shards build -v
- 2.Run with
./[your_app]
- 3.
Last modified 6mo ago