Crystal For Rubyists
  • Know Ruby? Enter Crystal!
  • book
    • Chapter 1: Why Crystal?
    • Chapter 2: Installing Crystal
    • Chapter 3: Writing Your First Crystal Program
    • Chapter 4: Creating a new project
    • Chapter 5: Testing
    • Chapter 6: FizzBuzz
    • Chapter 7: Types and Method Overloading
    • Chapter 8: Concurrency and Channels
    • Chapter 9: Macros and Metaprogramming
    • Chapter 10: C Bindings
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  • Binary installers
  • From Source
  1. book

Chapter 2: Installing Crystal

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Last updated 2 years ago

Binary installers

The Crystal project provides official binary installers. You can get both releases and nightlies. Binary installers are the fastest and easiest way to get going with Crystal. Because Crystal is written in Crystal, compiling the Crystal compiler actually entails compiling it three times! This means it’s quite slow. But a binary install should be snappy!

Crystal has a , so I recommend you just go check that out and download the proper version.

Note that this book has been tested with Crystal 1.5.0, and so if you use the latest nightly, something may have changed.

From Source

You will probably build the nightly version if you build from source, so be ready for some bugs in the code samples. This book was written for 1.5.0.

The has great instructions for building from source. Just got follow their instructions!

Future Proofing

The version this book is written for is 1.5.0

If you run

$ crystal

and it spits out a bunch of help information, you’re good to go with Crystal.

lovely installation page
Crystal README