Running locally

As the developers of Cerbforce began their investigation of the system the first step was getting a Cerbos instance up and running locally.

Config file

The first step is to create a server configuration file. The most simple configuration to get up and running using a local folder for storage of policies requires only the port and location to be set.

---
server:
  httpListenAddr: ":3592"
storage:
  driver: "disk"
  disk:
    directory: /policies

Save this file in a directory for example /tutorial/config/conf.yaml and also create an empty policy folder for example /tutorial/policies

You can find the full configuration schema in the Cerbos docs.

With the configuration defined there are two options to choose from for running Cerbos locally.

Container

If you have Docker you can simply use the published images. You need to mount the folder created in the preceding step into the container for it to be able to read the policies:

docker run --rm --name cerbos -t \
  -v /tutorial:/tutorial \
  -p 3592:3592 \
  ghcr.io/cerbos/cerbos:latest server --config=/tutorial/config/conf.yaml

Binary

Alternatively, if you don't have Docker running you can grab the relevant release binary from here, extract it, and then run:

./cerbos server --config=/tutorial/config/conf.yaml

Once started you can open http://localhost:3592 to see the API documentation.