zero-to-deploy.md

Quick Start - Zero to Deploy

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

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

Install crystal and amber

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 amber with homebrew also installs crystal

brew 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 build-essential libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev libpq-dev libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev
curl -L https://github.com/amberframework/amber/archive/stable.tar.gz | tar xz
cd amber-stable/
shards install
make install

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

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

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

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.

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

amber 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 amber generate scaffold command will help us do this.

Note: g is shorthand for generate

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 setup our database.

amber db will help us do this.

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

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

• Digital Ocean Deployment Guide
• Heroku Deployment Guide

List of Commands

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