Installation

Add Crest to your project with Maven coordinates or generate a new project with the archetype.

Maven Dependencies

Crest is split into two artifacts: the runtime and the API. Add both to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.tomitribe</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomitribe-crest</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.tomitribe</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomitribe-crest-api</artifactId>
</dependency>

The tomitribe-crest-api artifact contains the annotations (@Command, @Option, @Default, etc.) and interfaces your code compiles against. The tomitribe-crest artifact is the runtime that discovers commands, parses arguments, and invokes methods.

Maven Archetype

To scaffold a new Crest project quickly, use the Maven archetype:

mvn archetype:generate \
    -DarchetypeGroupId=org.tomitribe \
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=tomitribe-crest-archetype

This generates a project with the correct dependencies and a sample command class — but no main() method of its own. org.tomitribe.crest.Main is the entry point: the crest-maven-plugin’s descriptor goal records the command classes at build time and its executable goal produces a self-executing binary, so after mvn package the tool runs as ./target/<artifactId> <command>. The sample command also demonstrates typed positional arguments — a small Name value object rather than a bare String — so the usage line names what the argument is.

On this page