# Welcome to Garden!

Garden lets you spin up **production-like environments** for development, testing, and CI **on demand**. It enables teams to use the **same configuration** and workflows for **every stage of software delivery**—and dramatically **speeds up builds and test runs** via smart caching.

You can get started in minutes with the new [Garden dashboard](https://app.garden.io)! Just click the link and follow the interactive guide to deploy your first example project with Garden.

If there's something you can't find in our docs, we happily encourage you to [join our Discord community](https://discord.gg/FrmhuUjFs6) and/or file an issue on [our GitHub repo](https://github.com/garden-io/garden). We're more than happy to help!

### Overview

<table data-view="cards"><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th data-hidden data-card-target data-type="content-ref"></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><strong>How Garden Works</strong></td><td>A quick introduction to the how and why of Garden</td><td><a href="overview/how-garden-works">how-garden-works</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Garden vs Other Tools</strong></td><td>The cloud native tooling space is complex—learn where Garden fits in</td><td><a href="overview/garden-vs-other-tools">garden-vs-other-tools</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Adopting Garden</strong></td><td>A high level overview of how teams typically adopt and roll out Garden</td><td><a href="overview/adopting-garden">adopting-garden</a></td></tr></tbody></table>

### Getting Started

<table data-view="cards"><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th data-hidden data-card-target data-type="content-ref"></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><strong>Quickstart</strong></td><td>Get started with Garden in less than 5 minutes using our example project</td><td><a href="getting-started/quickstart">quickstart</a></td></tr><tr><td>"<strong>First Project" Tutorial</strong></td><td>This tutorial walks through the step-by-step process of configuring your first Garden project</td><td><a href="tutorials/your-first-project">your-first-project</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Next Steps</strong></td><td>Once you've kicked the tires with our quickstart example, come here to learn how to add Garden to your own project</td><td><a href="getting-started/next-steps">next-steps</a></td></tr></tbody></table>

### Using Garden

<table data-view="cards"><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th data-hidden data-card-target data-type="content-ref"></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><strong>Configuration Overview</strong></td><td>An introduction to how Garden projects are configured</td><td><a href="using-garden/configuration-overview">configuration-overview</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Kubernetes Plugins</strong></td><td>Most users come to Garden for our K8s plugins, here you learn how to set them up</td><td><a href="k8s-plugins/about">about</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Reference docs</strong></td><td>The pages in this section container reference docs for different plugins and actions types</td><td><a href="reference/providers">providers</a></td></tr></tbody></table>