Install Medusa Backend

This document will guide you through setting up your Medusa backend in a three steps.

Prerequisites

Medusa requires Node.js v16+, Git, and PostgreSQL to be installed. If you don't have them installed already, you can check out the Prepare Environment documnetation to learn how to install them.

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Create a Medusa Backend

It is recommended to use Yarn for the installation process as it's much faster than using NPM.

1. Install Medusa CLI

• npm
• Yarn
• pnpm

npm install @medusajs/medusa-cli -g

yarn global add @medusajs/medusa-cli

pnpm add @medusajs/medusa-cli -g

If you run into any errors while installing the CLI tool, check out the troubleshooting guide.

2. Create a new Medusa project

medusa new my-medusa-store

You'll then be asked to specify your PostgreSQL database credentials. You can choose "Continue" to use the default credentials shown in the terminal, choose "Change credentials" to specify your PostgreSQL credentails, or choose "Skip database setup" to create the database later.

:::warning

If you choose "Skip database setup" you will need to set the database configurations and run migrations later.

:::

3. Start your Medusa backend

cd my-medusa-store
medusa develop

Did you set up the backend successfully?

Seed Data

For better testing, you can add demo data to your Medusa backend by running the seed command in your Medusa backend directory:

medusa seed --seed-file=data/seed.json

Test the Backend

After these three steps and in only a couple of minutes, you now have a complete commerce engine running locally. You can test it out by sending a request using a tool like Postman or through the command line:

curl localhost:9000/store/products

Health Route

You can access /health to get health status of your backend.

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Next Steps

Backend Architecture

Learn about the different resources that your Medusa backend is made of.

Backend Configurations

Learn about configuring your backend and loading environment variables.