Getting started

An hour, give or take, from a bare FreeBSD host to a container serving traffic — and the pages below are in the order that hour actually happens. Do not skip the first one: two of its entries need a reboot or a package install, and finding that out half-way through is worse than reading a table.

1. Requirements — the checklist before you type anything, as what / why / what happens if it is missing.
2. Install — prepare the host, install the package, configure, start. Including the one trap that catches every stock install.
3. Your first container — bare host to a container serving traffic, with what breaks at each step if you skip it.
4. What just happened — a debrief: what satld created on your machine, and why satl rm removed more than you asked.
5. A real application — Node.js and MariaDB, a volume, a healthcheck and a private network, end to end. This is the page to send someone who asks what SatL is like to use.

Everything here is single-node. A single node is a cluster of one, so nothing you learn is thrown away when you add machines — see Clustering for that.