A geometric red cardinal taking its first flight from a branch

Install & infrastructure

Getting started.

For: anyone setting Cardinal up for the first time

Cardinal has two halves to set up: a desktop host where the agents live, and an Azure backend they share. This page is the map — what you'll do, in what order, and where each detailed guide lives. If you only want to understand the system rather than run it, read How it works instead.

Two halves: local + Azure ~2 hours first time Dry-run before apply

The big picture in a minute

The agents run on a desktop host and write to a database in Azure. The web app — Cardinal — runs in Azure too, over the same database. So setting up means: prepare the laptop, provision the cloud, then bring the agents to life. The customer-specific part is a thin slice; most of what you set up is reusable across engagements.

The path, step by step

1 · The desktop host

Install the host, restore the corpus, start the local message bus, authenticate in order, and smoke-test.

Install the desktop host →

2 · The Azure backend

Stand up the shared substrate once, then onboard the engagement's thin slice; deploy the app.

Provision Azure →

3 · Bring the ring to life

Validate the config, spawn the agents, pass the three greens, and start the Ticker.

Bootstrap the ring →

4 · See it run

Follow a signal from arrival to a human decision, end to end.

How it works →

Reference, not just recipe. For the catalogue of what every resource is and how they connect, see Infrastructure. For the vocabulary, the Glossary is a one-stop reference.