Quick Start

For technical users

This section assumes you know the terminal for your operating system, and can install software in a place where your terminal can find it.

trane-cli is the command-line interface for Trane. To install it download the appropriate binary for your operating system and CPU architecture from the Releases page. Then move the binary to a directory in your PATH environment variable or somewhere else where your terminal can find it.

From source

If you want to build the binary from source, you need to have the Rust toolchain installed. Then, clone the trane-cli repository and run the command cargo install --path .

Create your first Trane library

A Trane library is simply a directory with a .trane directory in it. Your progress and options are stored under this directory. This directory is created and populated automatically the first time you open it with Trane. Thus, the only thing needed to create a new Trane library is to create a new directory.

Opening your Trane library

From the directory you just created, open a terminal, and run the command trane. You should see a prompt like this:

trane >>

Inside this command-line interface, type open . followed by the Enter key. You should see a message saying that the library is open. To see a new exercise, type next. Since there are no materials downloaded yet, you'll get a message saying there was an error retrieving an exercise.

If you have difficulties navigating the command-line interface, refer to the "Basic shortcuts" section in the trane-cli documentation.

Downloading material for Trane.

For this guide, we'll use the official Trane course trane-music. Go to that webpage and click on the green button that says "Code". In the "Local" tab, there are options for cloning the repository. Click on the option that says "HTTPS" and copy the URL shown. In this example, it is https://github.com/trane-project/trane-music.git.

In the terminal, type the following command:

repository add https://github.com/trane-project/trane-music.git

This will download the contents of that repository into your computer in a directory called managed_courses. You can verify that the repository was downloaded by executing the command repository list.

Note: If you are using git to sync your Trane library, you should add the managed_courses directory to your .gitignore file. If you do not understand what the previous sentence means, you do not need to worry about it.

Working on your first exercise

Without exiting Trane, refresh the library by executing the command open .. Now that there are exercises in the library, you can execute the command next to get a new exercise. You should see the exercise on your screen. If an answer is available, you can see it by executing the command answer. Providing a score for the exercise is done by executing the command score <YOUR_SCORE>, where <YOUR_SCORE> is a number between 1 and 5 that indicates your mastery of the exercise. Once you have provided a score, you can get a new exercise by executing the command next.

For non-technical users

For less technical users, the only difference with respect to the previous section is that you should download the prebuilt trane binary and place it in the directory you created to store your Trane library. This way, you don't need to install it in a directory in your PATH environment variable if you don't know what that means. All the other steps are the same.

The Trane Book