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Installation

The Amber CLI offers you a set of command line tools to create, generate, scaffold and run your projects quickly and simply.

Linux

Ensure you have the necessary dependencies:

Git: Use your platform specific package manager to install git
Crystal: Follow the instructions to get crystal on this page: Crystal Installation
NodeJS and Webpack: node is an optional dependency and is used to compile JavaScript and other assets.
PostgreSQL: postgres is a relational database server. Amber configures applications to use this database adapter by default, but you can switch to MySQL by passing the flag --database mysql when creating a new application.

Once you have these dependencies, You can build the amber tool from source:

From Source

Download and install amber

Release note: Amber v1.5.0, published August 1, 2026, is the current stable framework release. These instructions preserve the Amber 1.x toolchain; use the V2 installation guide for the separate Amber CLI and V2 web template.

sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev libpq-dev libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libpcre3-dev libevent-dev
git clone https://github.com/amberframework/amber.git
cd amber
git checkout v1.5.0
shards install
make
sudo make install

If you run into an issue on compilation regarding Unhandled exception in spawn: fork: Cannot allocate memory it means you don't have enough memory. This can easily be solved by adding a swapfile.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=2k count=1024k
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

For Debian & Ubuntu

Currently, the only method to install on Debian based distros is to compile from source.
These are necessary to compile the CLI:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev libpq-dev libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev

For RedHat & CentOS

sudo yum groupinstall development tools
sudo yum install readline-devel sqlite-devel openssl-devel libyaml-devel gc-devel libevent-devel

For ArchLinux & derivates

Install the CLI from AUR package. Dependencies are automatically installed.
yaourt -S amber

You should now be able to run amber in the command line.

macOS

Installing Amber with these package managers also installs Crystal.

Homebrew

brew tap amberframework/amber
brew install amber

MacPorts

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install amber

From source

Known problems while trying to build Amber from source on macOS:

If you see linker problems, such as ld: library not found for -lssl (this usually means you need to install the development package for libssl), you may need to set some (or all) of those environment variables:
Output
```
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/pkgconfig"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include"
```