Happy
Learn Crystal web development by building small, self-hosted team ritual tools — and pick the right framework for the problem size.
Happy is a suite of tiny apps, each built with a different Crystal framework on purpose. The lesson isn't "always reach for the biggest tool" — it's that the problem size should dictate the choice. Every tutorial is a build-along: the code is the tutorial, the commits follow the prose, and each app ships as a tiny container you can self-host today.
Tutorials
- Moving Motivators — Crystal + Kemal — an ephemeral, real-time session tool with no database. Start here.
More coming: Kudos (Lucky — auth, uploads, history) and a niko-niko API (Spider-Gazelle — OpenAPI contract, Backstage plugin).
How to read these
Each page opens with a live demo and a docker pull command, so you can try the
finished app before reading a line of code. Then we build it from scratch, letting
the problem size drive every technical decision.
Content is licensed CC-BY-SA; code samples are MIT. No third-party analytics — this site tracks nothing.