Quick Start

This guide gets a FeltnerAI server running locally and walks you through first-run setup.

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.96 or newer
• Bun 1.3 or newer
• just (optional, but used by the project’s commands)

Build and run

The React web app is embedded into the server binary, so build the frontend first.

1. Install frontend dependencies:

   bun install --cwd frontend --frozen-lockfile

2. Build the web application:

   bun run --cwd frontend build

3. Run the server:

   cargo run -p feltnerai-server

4. Open the app in your browser:

   http://127.0.0.1:8080

First-run setup

On startup the server prints a temporary setup token to the console. You need it to create the first administrator.

The setup token is temporary

The token changes on every restart and is permanently disabled once setup completes. Treat it as a one-time secret and never commit it anywhere.

1. Copy the setup token from the server console output.

2. In the browser, follow the setup flow. You will:

   • test and save an OpenAI-compatible provider,
   • create the first administrator account.

3. Sign in as the administrator and create accounts for your users from Admin → Users. New accounts are forced to change their password on first sign-in.

Develop with hot reload

For local development, run the server and Vite separately so the frontend hot-reloads.

Terminal 1 — server

just server

Terminal 2 — frontend

just dev

Vite serves http://127.0.0.1:5173 and proxies /api to the server on port 8080.

Use a disposable data directory when testing setup repeatedly so you can start from a clean state:

$env:FELTNERAI_DATA_DIR="$PWD\target\dev-data"
cargo run -p feltnerai-server

Next steps

• Set up a server for production
• Configure providers
• Download a client