Installation

System Requirements🔗

Spade runs on Linux and macOS. You need:

• A terminal with a POSIX-compatible shell (bash, zsh)
• Git (for building block collections from source with spade install; not needed for registry-fetch installs like spade install gdal@latest)

For block development, you also need the toolchain for your chosen language — see the library documentation for specifics.

Install the Spade CLI🔗

The Spade CLI is a single Go binary. Install it with:

go install github.com/spade-dev/spade/cli@latest

This places the spade binary in your $GOPATH/bin directory. Make sure that directory is in your PATH.

Initialize Spade🔗

After installing, run the setup command to create the local Spade directory:

spade setup

This creates ~/.spade/ with the following structure:

~/.spade/
  auth/        # Session credentials from `spade login`
  blocks/      # Installed block collections
  cache/       # Execution cache for block outputs
  pipelines/   # Working directories for pipeline runs
  registry.db  # SQLite registry of installed blocks

Verify the installation🔗

Check that everything is working:

spade --help

You should see output listing all available commands:

Spade - A data processing system for massive data

Usage:
  spade [command]

Available Commands:
  run         Run a pipeline locally
  check       Validate blocks or pipelines
  install     Install a block collection from the cloud registry, a git repository, or a local directory
  publish     Submit a block collection to the cloud registry for screening, build, and distribution
  init        Create a new block collection
  add         Add a new block to the current collection
  setup       Set up the Spade environment
  login       Authenticate to the cloud registry
  secret      Manage local and cloud secrets for pipeline runs

Custom install location🔗

By default, Spade stores everything in ~/.spade/. To use a different location, set the SPADE_DIR environment variable:

export SPADE_DIR=/path/to/custom/spade
spade setup

Language toolchains🔗

To develop blocks, you need the appropriate language toolchain installed:

Next steps🔗

Now that Spade is installed, continue to Your First Pipeline to run a simple workflow.