# Installing Derby

To install Derby you must first download the Derby zip or tar archive from the Derby Web site.

Navigate your Web browser to http://db.apache.org/derby/derby_downloads.html. This downloads page provides several distributions of Derby, including prerelease snapshots as well as stable-version binary distributions. You will also find information on how to use the Subversion version control system to access the Derby source code that is currently in development.

The distributions are:

- The bin distribution contains scripts, demonstration programs, and documentation. The optimized jar files are available in the lib distribution.
- The lib distribution contains an optimized, small footprint set of the Derby jar files for deployment.
- The lib-debug distribution contains a larger footprint set of the Derby jar files that are useful for debugging or reporting issues.
- The src distribution contains the source files that are used to create the bin, lib, and lib-debug distributions.

This guide assumes that you have downloaded the bin distribution.

Extract the downloaded package. The extracted installation contains several subdirectories:

- The demo subdirectory contains the demonstration programs.
- The bin subdirectory contains the scripts for executing utilities and setting up the environment.
- The javadoc subdirectory contains the `api` documentation that was generated from source code comments.
- The docs subdirectory contains the Derby documentation.
- The lib subdirectory contains the Derby jar files.
- The test subdirectory contains regression tests for Derby.
- The frameworks subdirectory contains older style scripts for executing utilities and setting up the environment. These are provided in this release for backward compatibility. In a next release, they will be deprecated in favor of the scripts in the bin directory.

Parent topic: Installing and working with Derby
Related tasks
Setting up your environment