.. _cartridge_readme:

================================================================================ Tarantool Cartridge

A framework for distributed applications development.

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About Tarantool Cartridge

Tarantool Cartridge allows you to easily develop Tarantool-based applications and run them on one or more Tarantool instances organized into a cluster.

This is the recommended alternative to the old-school practices <https://www.tarantool.io/en/doc/latest/book/app_server/>_ of application development for Tarantool.

As a software development kit (SDK), Tarantool Cartridge provides you with utilities and an application template to help:

• easily set up a development environment for your applications;
• plug the necessary Lua modules.

The resulting package can be installed and started on one or multiple servers as one or multiple instantiated services |--| independent or organized into a cluster.

A Tarantool cluster is a collection of Tarantool instances acting in concert. While a single Tarantool instance can leverage the performance of a single server and is vulnerable to failure, the cluster spans multiple servers, utilizes their cumulative CPU power, and is fault-tolerant.

To fully utilize the capabilities of a Tarantool cluster, you need to develop applications keeping in mind they are to run in a cluster environment.

As a cluster management tool, Tarantool Cartridge provides your cluster-aware applications with the following key benefits:

• horizontal scalability and load balancing via built-in automatic sharding;
• asynchronous replication;
• automatic failover;
• centralized cluster control via GUI or API;
• automatic configuration synchronization;
• instance functionality segregation.

A Tarantool Cartridge cluster can segregate functionality between instances via built-in and custom (user-defined) cluster roles. You can toggle instances on and off on the fly during cluster operation. This allows you to put different types of workloads (e.g., compute- and transaction-intensive ones) on different physical servers with dedicated hardware.

Tarantool Cartridge has an external utility called cartridge-cli <https://github.com/tarantool/cartridge-cli>_ which provides you with utilities and an application template to help:

• easily set up a development environment for your applications;
• plug the necessary Lua modules;
• pack the applications in an environment-independent way: together with module binaries and Tarantool executables.

Getting started

Prerequisites

To get a template application that uses Tarantool Cartridge and run it, you need to install several packages:

• tarantool and tarantool-dev (see these instructions <https://www.tarantool.io/en/download/>_);
• cartridge-cli (see these instructions <https://github.com/tarantool/cartridge-cli#installation>_)
• git, gcc, cmake and make.

Create your first application

Long story short, copy-paste this into the console:

.. code-block:: bash

cartridge create --name myapp
cd myapp
cartridge build
cartridge start -d
cartridge replicasets setup --bootstrap-vshard

That's all! Now you can visit http://localhost:8081 and see your application's Admin Web UI:

.. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/32142520/109290877-3d30a800-7839-11eb-8fcf-8b3de1237a3b.png :align: center :scale: 100%

Next steps

See:

• A more detailed getting started guide <https://www.tarantool.io/en/doc/latest/getting_started/getting_started_cartridge/>_
• More application examples <https://github.com/tarantool/examples>_
• Cartridge documentation <https://www.tarantool.io/en/doc/latest/book/cartridge/>_
• Cartridge API reference <https://www.tarantool.io/en/doc/latest/book/cartridge/cartridge_api/>_

Contributing

The most essential contribution is your feedback, don't hesitate to open an issue <https://github.com/tarantool/cartridge/issues/new>. If you'd like to propose some changes in code, see the contribution guide <https://github.com/tarantool/cartridge/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst>.

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