tutorials

Quickstart

Install Marreta, scaffold a project, and serve your first endpoint in a couple of minutes.

This is the five-minute tour: install the runtime, scaffold a project, and hit a live endpoint. By the end you will have a running API and know where everything lives.

Prerequisites

  • A terminal on macOS, Linux, or Windows via WSL.
  • curl, to install the runtime and to call the running API.

1. Install

bash
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tm-dev-lab/marreta-lang/main/install.sh | sh

That drops a single marreta binary on your PATH. Check it:

bash
marreta --version

2. Scaffold a project

bash
marreta init hello
cd hello

init writes a tiny but complete project: an entrypoint, one schema, one task, one route, and a test.

text
hello/
  app.marreta              # project metadata (name, version, required runtime)
  schemas/greetings.marreta
  tasks/greetings.marreta
  routes/greetings.marreta
  tests/greetings_test.marreta
  marreta.env              # local config (gitignored)

The route it generates is the whole story in four lines:

marreta
route GET "/greetings"
    message = greetings.build_greeting("Marreta")
    reply 200 as GreetingResponse, { message: message }

greetings.build_greeting is a task defined in tasks/greetings.marreta and called by its file’s namespace, with no imports. reply 200 as GreetingResponse shapes and validates the response against the schema.

3. Serve it

bash
marreta serve

The server comes up on port 8080 by default. In another terminal:

bash
curl http://localhost:8080/greetings
json
{ "message": "Hello, Marreta!" }

That is a real, schema-validated HTTP response, with no framework wiring and no boilerplate.

4. Run the tests

The scaffold ships a scenario test that exercises the endpoint end to end:

bash
marreta test

Scenario tests live next to your code under tests/ and read like the behavior they check (when GET "/greetings" … then response is { ... }), so they double as executable documentation.

5. Check the project’s health

bash
marreta doctor

doctor loads the project the same way serve does and reports what it found (configuration, persistence, modules, test coverage) without starting the server. It is the fastest way to catch a misconfiguration before you deploy.

Result checkpoint

You should now have Marreta installed, a scaffolded hello project, and a running API that answers GET /greetings with a schema-validated JSON response. marreta test passes and marreta doctor reports a healthy project.

Where to go next

You did not configure a database, a router, or a serializer to get here, and that is the point. Add capability only when you need it, and Marreta keeps the rest out of your way.