path: root/guide/introduction.md

Introduction
============

Purpose
-------

Ranch is a socket acceptor pool for TCP protocols.

Ranch aims to provide everything you need to accept TCP connections
with a small code base and low latency while being easy to use directly
as an application or to embed into your own.

Prerequisites
-------------

It is assumed the developer already knows Erlang and has some experience
with socket programming and TCP protocols.

In order to run the examples available in this user guide, you will need
Erlang and rebar installed and in your $PATH.

Please see the [rebar repository](https://github.com/basho/rebar) for
downloading and building instructions. Please look up the environment
variables documentation of your system for details on how to update the
$PATH information.