Installing Garden

This page details the different installation methods for Garden.

Please follow the guide for your operating system:

• macOS

• Windows

• Linux

If you'd like to run Kubernetes locally, please see our local Kubernetes guide for installation and usage information.

If you want to install Garden from source, see the instructions in our contributor guide.

Requirements

You need the following dependencies on your local machine to use Garden:

• Git (v2.14 or newer)

• rsync (v3.1.0 or newer)

And if you'd like to build and run services locally, you need a local installation of Kubernetes. Garden is committed to supporting the latest six stable versions (i.e. if the latest stable version is v1.23.x, Garden supports v1.18.x and newer).

macOS

For Mac, we recommend the following steps to install Garden. You can also follow the manual installation steps below if you prefer.

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

Step 1: Install Homebrew

If you haven't already set up Homebrew, please follow their installation instructions.

Step 2: Install Garden (macOS)

You can easily install Garden using Homebrew or using our installation script. You may also manually download Garden from the releases page on GitHub.

Homebrew

brew tap garden-io/garden
brew install garden-cli

To later upgrade to the newest version, simply run brew update and then brew upgrade garden-cli.

Installation script (macOS)

First make sure the requirements listed above are installed. Then run our automated installation script:

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

To later upgrade to the latest version, simply run the script again.

Manual download and install (macOS)

If you prefer, you can perform the installation manually, as follows:

1. Make sure the requirements listed above are installed.
2. Visit the Garden releases page on GitHub and download the macOS archive (under Assets).
3. Next create a ~/.garden/bin directory, and extract the archive to that directory. Make sure to include the whole contents of the archive.

4. Lastly, either add the ~/.garden/bin directory to your PATH, or add a symlink from your /usr/local/bin/garden to the binary at ~/.garden/bin/garden.

Step 3 (optional): Docker and local Kubernetes

To install Docker, Kubernetes and kubectl, we recommend Docker for Mac.

Please refer to their installation guide for how to download and install it (which is a pretty simple process).

If you'd like to use a local Kubernetes cluster, please refer to the Local Kubernetes guide for further information. For remote clusters, take a look at the Remote Kubernetes guide.

Windows

You can run Garden on Windows 10 Home, Pro or Enterprise editions.

Note: The Home edition doesn't support virtualization, but you can still use Garden if you're working with remote Kubernetes and in-cluster building.

To install the Garden CLI and its dependencies, please use our installation script. To run the script, 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/main/support/install.ps1'))

The things the script will check for are the following:

• The Chocolatey package manager. The script installs it automatically if necessary.
• git and rsync . The script will install or upgrade those via Chocolatey.

To later upgrade to the newest version, simply re-run the above script.

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.

Note that you must run Powershell with elevated permissions when you execute this command.

Linux

Step 1: Install core dependencies

Use your preferred method or package manager to install git and rsync. On Ubuntu, that's sudo apt install git rsync, on Alpine apk add --no-cache git rsync

The Alpine linux distribution also requires gcc to be installed: apk add --no-cache gcc.

Step 2: Install Garden

Installation script (Linux)

You can use our installation script to install Garden automatically:

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

To later upgrade to the latest version, simply run the script again.

Manual download and install (Linux)

If you prefer, you can perform the installation manually, as follows:

1. Visit the Garden releases page on GitHub and download the linux archive (under Assets).
2. Next create a ~/.garden/bin directory, and extract the archive to that directory. Make sure to include the whole contents of the archive.

3. Lastly, either add the ~/.garden/bin directory to your PATH, or add a symlink from your /usr/local/bin/garden to the binary at ~/.garden/bin/garden.

Step 3 (optional): Local Kubernetes

If you'd like to use a local Kubernetes cluster, please refer to the local Kubernetes guide for installation and usage information.

Using Garden with proxies

If you're running Garden behind a firewall, you may need to use a proxy to route external requests. To do this, you need to set the HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY environment variables. For example:

export HTTP_PROXY=http://localhost:9999               # <- Replace with your proxy address.
export HTTPS_PROXY=$HTTP_PROXY                        # <- Replace if you use a separate proxy for HTTPS.
export NO_PROXY=local.demo.garden,localhost,127.0.0.1  # <- This is important! See below.

The NO_PROXY variable should include any other hostnames you might use for local development, since you likely don't want to route local traffic through the proxy.