Quickstart

Six pages to take you from "nothing" to "Director loads in a browser." Run them in order.

Pages in this section

#	Page	What you'll do
1	Install the CLI	Get the hivecast binary onto your machine
2	Start a local host	Run hivecast install and verify the Host is up
3	Login / pair a device	(Optional) Pair this Device to a HiveCast account
4	Install a package	Add a package to the Host's package store
5	Run a package	Bring a package up as a supervised runtime
6	Open the dashboard	Verify everything works in a browser

What you'll have at the end

• a running local Host on your machine (or in a container/VM)
• a sibling NATS broker
• the bundled webapps reachable at http://127.0.0.1:3100/apps/{web,edge,director,chat,flowpad,smithers}/
• (optionally) a Device Link to a HiveCast account

What you won't have

• inference credentials (configure them later via the Inference Settings webapp)
• production HiveCast traffic (the local Host does not depend on hivecast.ai)
• multi-user authentication on a fresh local install (auth.mode: 'local-client' is the default)

Prerequisites

• Linux (Ubuntu/Debian preferred for the .deb), macOS, or Windows; container/VM is fine
• Node 20+ (only needed for the source-checkout install path)
• a free TCP port (default 3100); pin to another with --http-port <N>
• ~500 MB of disk for <MATRIX_HOME> after install

If you hit anything during these six steps, jump to Troubleshooting → Host not running and the symptom-driven recipes there.

See also

• Overview → What is HiveCast?
• CLI command overview

Source: authored from projects/matrix-3/packages/hivecast/bin/hivecast.mjs and projects/matrix-3/packages/docs/content/operations/setup-guide.md.