Install & Run

Welcome! In this Getting Started guide, we’ll first see how to install TrailBase, followed by tutorials on building our first small applications.

TrailBase is a single static executable and therefore very easy to install. It’s as simple as downloading the latest release for your system and running it. If you prefer building your own binary, check out our GitHub page.

If you want to get started even quicker, you can simply run one of the following commands:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trailbaseio/trailbase/main/install.sh | bash

iwr https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trailbaseio/trailbase/main/install.sh | iex

# Docker is used here merely as an easy, portable way to install TrailBase.
# To make this persistent, you'll have to add the alias to your shell's rc.
alias trail='
  mkdir traildepot && \
  docker run \
      --network host \
      --mount type=bind,source="$PWD"/traildepot,target=/app/traildepot \
      trailbase/trailbase /app/trail'

Once installed, you can run

trail help

to check that the executable is properly installed and see all available command line options.

Starting the Server & Admin Dashboard

After successfully installing TrailBase above, you can run

trail run

to bring up the server on localhost:4000.

On first start, a ./traildepot folder will be created. It contains configuration, databases, secrets and a few more things. Moreover, an admin user will be created with their credentials printed to your terminal. Watch out for something like:

Created new admin user:
        email: 'admin@localhost'
        password: '<random>'

Optionally, you can change the credentials to something more fitting:

trail user change-password admin@localhost mypassword
trail user change-email admin@localhost [email protected]

Armed with your new credentials, open http://localhost:4000/_/admin/ in your browser and log in.

We encourage you to take a few minutes, click around, and maybe create a table or two. Note that when creating, altering, or deleting tables, indexes or views a schema migration file will be created in traildepot/migrations. This allows TrailBase to enforce consistent schemas across multiple database instances for dev, test, prod, … .

If you like what you see and want to get your hands dirty, consider checking out some of the tutorials. Lastly, if you have any issues or feedback, don’t hesitate and reach out either on GitHub or via [email protected].