Quickstart Guide

A visual quickstart is also available by logging in to the Garden Dashboard. The Dashboard can show you the status of your builds, deployments and stream logs from your services in real-time. To get started, click Dashboard Quickstart.
Garden is an all-in-one DevOps platform that enables you to build, test, deploy your applications and infrastructure in a single, unified workflow.
Quickstart
In this quickstart, we'll introduce you to the one interactive command you'll spend most of your time in as a developer: garden dev.
In just 2 steps, 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:
macOS
Linux
Windows
brew install garden-io/garden/garden-cli
For a Mac computer with Apple silicon, Garden needs Rosetta.
curl -sL https://get.garden.io/install.sh | bash
Open PowerShell as an administrator and run:
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:
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "C:\Path\To\Your\Repo\.garden"
This will significantly speed up the first Garden build of large projects on Windows machines.
For more detailed installation instructions, please see our Installation guide.
Step 2 — Clone the example project
Next, we clone the example project from GitHub and change into the project directory:
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 provided by Garden.
From inside the project directory, start the dev console by running:
garden dev
Next, you need to log in to the Garden web dashboard by running the log in command from the dev console:
login
Now you are ready to deploy, run:
deploy
You should now be able to visit the example project at 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!
You can run all the same commands with the CLI directly without starting the dev console. Simply run garden login or garden deploy from your terminal. This is e.g. how you'd use Garden in CI.
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 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 and the section of our docs title Using Garden, 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!
Last modified 1d ago