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Zenvara Docs

Installation & First Boot

This page takes you from “I have a Zenvara service” to “I’ve confirmed it’s healthy.” The full operations guide for production targets lives under Deployment.

Before you start

Section titled “Before you start”

Many teams receive Zenvara pre-installed by an administrator as a Windows service or a Linux daemon. If that is you, the binary is already running on its host — usually localhost:5000 on the same machine, or a server name behind your VPN — and you can jump straight to First boot.

If you need to install Zenvara yourself, the supported targets are Windows Service, Linux + systemd, IIS, Docker, Kubernetes, and a from-source build for development. The platform is a single self-contained binary plus a data/ directory — roughly 200 MB on disk plus whatever data/ grows into, no JVM, no Python interpreter, no cluster required.

Run from source (development)

Section titled “Run from source (development)”

Zenvara is a proprietary product — most installations run from a delivered binary artifact (see Deployment Targets). If your team has been granted source access, you can run it directly for development and short-lived demos. From the root of the source tree:

Terminal window
dotnet run --project Zenvara/Zenvara.fsproj

This starts the Web API on http://localhost:5000 with Swagger at /swagger. Build prerequisites bootstrap automatically on first build. This is not a production target; for production see Deployment Targets.

First boot — verifying the install

Section titled “First boot — verifying the install”

Whichever path you took, point a browser or curl at these two endpoints:

  • http://localhost:5000/swagger — interactive REST surface, useful for poking at endpoints during development.
  • http://localhost:5000/api/v1/platform/diagnostics — machine-readable readiness probe. A healthy install returns 200 with a JSON body listing the environment count, operator count, and version banner.
  • http://localhost:5000/health — liveness probe (used by Docker HEALTHCHECK and Kubernetes liveness).
Terminal window
curl -s http://localhost:5000/api/v1/platform/diagnostics | head

If diagnostics returns 503 or the connection refuses, see Troubleshooting.

Studio UI

Section titled “Studio UI”

Zenvara ships a web-based IDE — Studio — served by the backend at /studio/. It gives you flow editing, a data viewer, invocation logs, and the entity browser without leaving the browser. A desktop wrapper (Electron) and the ZenvaraStudio.exe / scripts/zenvara-start.{cmd,sh} launchers provide a one-click “start the backend and open the IDE” experience for non-developers.

Next step

Section titled “Next step”

You have a healthy install. Write and invoke your first flow →