# Quickstart Guide

{% hint style="info" %}
An interactive quickstart is also available by logging in to the Garden dashboard. With the dashboard you can access command history, stream logs in real-time, view the status of your builds, tests, and deploys, visualize your dependency graph, and manage your free ephemeral clusters. To get started, [launch the Garden Web Dashboard](https://app.garden.io).
{% endhint %}

## Quickstart

Garden is an all-in-one DevOps automation platform that enables you to build, test, and deploy your applications and infrastructure in a single, unified workflow.

In this quickstart guide, we'll:

* Install Garden
* Deploy an example application to a remote ephemeral Kubernetes cluster.

### Step 1 — Install Garden

Install the Garden CLI for your platform:

{% tabs %}
{% tab title="macOS" %}

```sh
brew install garden-io/garden/garden-cli
```

{% endtab %}

{% tab title="Linux" %}

```sh
curl -sL https://get.garden.io/install.sh | bash
```

{% endtab %}

{% tab title="Windows" %}
Open PowerShell as an administrator and run:

```powershell
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/garden-io/garden/master/support/install.ps1'))
```

We also recommend adding an exclusion folder for the `.garden` directory in your repository root to Windows Defender:

```powershell
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "C:\Path\To\Your\Repo\.garden"
```

This will significantly speed up the first Garden build of large projects on Windows machines.
{% endtab %}
{% endtabs %}

For more detailed installation instructions, please see our [Installation guide](/bonsai-0.13/getting-started/installation.md).

### Step 2 — Clone the example project

Next, we clone the example project from GitHub and change into the project directory:

```sh
git clone https://github.com/garden-io/quickstart-example.git
cd quickstart-example
```

### Step 3 — Deploy the project

Now we can deploy the example project to an [ephemeral Kubernetes cluster](/bonsai-0.13/k8s-plugins/ephemeral-k8s.md) provided by Garden.

From inside the project directory, log in to the Garden dashboard by running the log in command from the dev console:

```sh
garden login
```

Next, start the **dev console** by running:

```sh
garden dev
```

Finally, let's deploy the project in sync mode which enables live code reloading:

```sh
deploy --sync
```

You can now visit the example project via the link output by Garden.

The quickstart also comes with some tests of the unit and end-to-end variety. To run your unit test, just run `test unit`. To run your end-to-end test, run `test e2e`. Easy!

The project itself doubles as an interactive guide that walks you through some common Garden commands and workflows. We encourage you to give it a spin!

{% hint style="info" %}
You can run all the same commands with the CLI directly without starting the dev console. Simply run `garden login` or `garden deploy --sync` from your terminal. This is e.g. how you'd use Garden in CI.
{% endhint %}

## Next Steps

Now that you have Garden installed and seen its basic capabilities it's time to take the next steps.

If you'd like to better understand how a Garden project is configured, we recommend going through our [first project tutorial](/bonsai-0.13/tutorials/your-first-project.md) which walks you through configuring a Garden project step-by-step.

If you like to dive right in and configure your own project for Garden, we recommend referencing our [example projects on GitHub](https://github.com/garden-io/garden/tree/0.13.62/examples) and the section of our docs title [Using Garden](/bonsai-0.13/using-garden/configuration-overview.md), which covers all parts of Garden in detail.

If you have any questions or feedback—or just want to say hi 🙂—we encourage you to join our [Discord community](https://go.garden.io/discord)!


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.garden.io/bonsai-0.13/getting-started/quickstart.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.