pekko/akka-docs/src/main/paradox/scala/guide/quickstart.md

# Quickstart

After all this introduction, we are ready to build our first actor system. We will do so in five chapters.
This first chapter will help you to set up your project, tools and have a simple "Hello World" demo running.
We will keep this section to a bare minimum and then extend the sample application in the next chapter.

> Our goal in this chapter is to set up a working environment for you, create an application that starts up and stops
an ActorSystem and create an actor which we will run and test.

Akka requires that you have [Java 8](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html) or
later installed on your machine.

As the very first thing, we need to make sure that we can compile our project and have a working IDE setup to be
able to edit code comfortably.

The easiest way is to use the @scala[[Akka Quickstart with Scala guide](http://developer.lightbend.com/guides/akka-quickstart-scala/)] @java[[Akka Quickstart with Java guide](http://developer.lightbend.com/guides/akka-quickstart-java/)]. It contains a Hello World example that illustrates Akka basics. Within 30 minutes, you should be able to download and run the example and use that guide to understand how the example is constructed.

After that you can go back here and you are ready to dive deeper.