# Installing Derby

To install Derby you must download the distribution and extract the package.

There are several distributions of Derby, including binary and source distributions for the latest official release and for previous official releases.

The distributions are:

- The bin distribution contains scripts, demonstration programs, documentation, and the optimized .jar files. These .jar files are the same set of .jar files that are 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.

Important: The remainder of the instructions in this guide assume that you have downloaded the bin distribution.

To install Derby:

Navigate your Web browser to http://db.apache.org/derby/derby_downloads.html. The downloads page provides links to the distributions of Derby This page also contains a link to http://db.apache.org/derby/dev/derby_source.html, where you can find information on how to use the Subversion version control system to access the Derby source code for a specific branch or for the development trunk.

Download the ZIP or TAR archive for the distribution that you want to use.

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.

Parent topic: Installing and configuring Derby