Chapter 2: Installing Crystal
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 lovely installation page, 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 Crystal README 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
and it spits out a bunch of help information, you’re good to go with Crystal.
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