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Quickstart

This walks you from nothing to a running VortexFlow with a live Vector instance in a few minutes, using the bundled demo stack. The demo stack adds a self-registering Vector agent and a metrics generator on top of the normal deployment, so you can see fleets, health, and live taps working immediately without wiring up your own hosts first.

For a real deployment against your own Vector instances, see Installation instead.

Prerequisites

  • Docker and Docker Compose (Compose v2 — the docker compose subcommand).
  • About 2 GB of free memory for the full stack (backend, web, PostgreSQL, Redis, VictoriaMetrics, and the demo Vector agent).

1. Start the stack

From the repository root:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.demo.yml up -d

This builds and starts:

Service Role
web nginx front door — serves the UI and proxies the API (ports 80 / 443)
backend the VortexFlow API
postgres configuration store
redis sessions and brute-force counters
victoriametrics stores Vector's internal metrics for the health dashboard
demo-agent a real Vector instance that registers itself into a fleet

The first run builds images and may take a minute. Watch progress with docker compose logs -f backend.

2. Open the UI

Browse to https://localhost. The demo stack uses a self-signed certificate, so your browser will warn once — accept it to continue (or see TLS & Certificates to install a real cert).

3. Sign in

The demo stack seeds an administrator account:

  • Email: admin@example.com
  • Password: ChangeMe123!

You'll be prompted to set a new password on first sign-in. (On a non-demo install there is no seeded account — an admin recovery token is printed to the logs at startup instead; see Installation.)

4. Look around

Once you're in, the demo data gives you something to explore:

  • Health — the home dashboard. You should see throughput climbing as the demo agent reports metrics, broken down by fleet.
  • Fleets — the demo agent has registered into a fleet. Open it to see its members and their rollout state. (Fleets)
  • Flow — the visual pipeline canvas for the selected fleet. Add a source or a transform and watch it render. (Pipelines & Flow)
  • Live Tap — sample real events flowing through the demo agent. Pick the demo's transform and toggle Compare before/after to see the remap's effect. (Tap live events)

See the unhealthy states too. To watch the health chips and the "Needs attention" alerts light up, add the fault overlay — it brings up a deliberately failing chaos-agent (dropping events, full buffers, 503s) in its own fleet, leaving the healthy demo untouched:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.demo.yml \
  -f docker-compose.faults.yml up -d

Remove it with docker rm -f chaos-agent vortexflow-fault-sink-1. See Monitor fleet health.

5. Make your first change

A good first end-to-end loop:

  1. In Flow, add a source and a sink to the demo fleet.
  2. Open the fleet's Config view to preview the rendered Vector YAML.
  3. Click Deploy. VortexFlow validates the config, then publishes it to the demo agent, which reloads Vector. (Render, Deploy & Rollout)

That's the core workflow: build → render → validate → deploy → observe.

Tearing down

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.demo.yml down

Add -v to also remove the volumes (PostgreSQL and metrics data) for a fully clean slate.

Next steps