Quickstart Guide

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.

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:

macOS

brew install garden-io/garden/garden-cli

For a Mac computer with Apple silicon, Garden needs Rosetta.

Linux

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

Windows

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, log in to the Garden dashboard by running the log in command from the dev console:

garden login

Next, start the dev console by running:

garden dev

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

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!

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.

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!