Quick Start

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

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

Let’s get started!

1. Install dependencies

If you already have crystal, maze, and a database installed, you can skip this step.

1.1 Install crystal and maze

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

OS X with homebrew

Installing crystal with homebrew

brew update
brew install crystal-lang

Ubuntu or Debian

First install crystal and required libraries

curl https://dist.crystal-lang.org/apt/setup.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential crystal git libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev libpq-dev libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev

Then install maze (from github)

sudo apt-get install
git clone https://github.com/mazeframework/maze.git
cd maze/
shards build maze
sudo cp bin/maze /usr/local/bin

Above are the steps for building from source, the dependencies are specific to Ubuntu/Debian. See full installation instructions for other Linux Distributions.

1.2 Install a database

Maze 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

On OS X any of the databases can be installed with brew install [database]

2. Generate a new Maze application

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

The default setup will use a postgresql database, use -d mysql or -d sqlite for mysql and sqlite, respectively.

maze new pet-tracker
cd pet-tracker
shards install

3. Generate a resource

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

The maze generate scaffold command will help us do this.

g is shorthand for generate

maze 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 setup our database.

maze db will help us do this.

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

maze watch

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 7 RESTful actions for the “pets” resource.

7. Deploy your web application

Deployment

List of Commands

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

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

Demo

Here is a demo and the source code is available on Github.

Quick Start Demo