Shard

A shard in crystal defines the set of dependencies for your app. It is defined in the shard.yml file of your application. Here is an example shard.yml:

name: rovers
version: 0.1.0

authors:
  - Flinn Burgess <[e-mail]>

targets:
  rovers:
    main: src/rovers.cr

crystal: 0.31.1

license: MIT

dependencies:
  kemal:
    github: kemalcr/kemal
  rover:
    github: batate/rover

Installing dependencies

To install the dependencies of your project you can use the command

shards install

Requiring dependencies

Once a dependency exists in your shard.yml file, you can include that dependency in any of your source code by simply refering to the key in shard.yml, rather than explicitly providing the path.

Using the example above, we could insert the line

require "rover"

into our code, and the rover dependency will be imported.