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Local Development Setup

This guide helps you set up a local development environment with all the services needed to run the Expanso examples.

Philosophy​

Each example is designed to be self-contained. To support this, we provide individual Docker Compose files for each required service, such as Kafka, PostgreSQL, or Redis. You only need to start the services required for the specific example you are working on.

Available Services​

Each of the following services has a dedicated setup page with instructions and the necessary Docker Compose configuration file content.

  • Kafka: A distributed event streaming platform.
  • PostgreSQL: A powerful, open-source object-relational database system.
  • Redis: An in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker.

Please refer to the setup.mdx file for the example you are interested in to see which services are required.

General Setup​

The following steps are common to all examples.

Environment Variables​

Set these environment variables for use across examples. You can add them to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc to make them permanent.

# Kafka
export KAFKA_BROKERS="localhost:9092"

# PostgreSQL
export DB_CONNECTION_STRING="postgresql://expanso:expanso@localhost:5432/expanso_dev"

# Redis
export REDIS_URL="redis://localhost:6379"

# Verify configuration
echo "Kafka: $KAFKA_BROKERS"
echo "PostgreSQL: $DB_CONNECTION_STRING"
echo "Redis: $REDIS_URL"

Install Expanso CLI Tools​

Install the Expanso command-line tools to deploy and manage pipelines:

# Install expanso-cli (control plane interaction)
curl -fsSL https://get.expanso.io/cli/install.sh | bash

# Install expanso-edge (local pipeline execution)
curl -fsSL https://get.expanso.io/edge/install.sh | bash

# Verify installation
expanso-cli version
expanso-edge version

Configure CLI Profile​

# Save your profile (get token from Expanso dashboard)
expanso-cli profile save --name default --endpoint https://api.expanso.io

# Verify connection
expanso-cli health

Verify Services​

Ensure all required services are running for your specific example. Each example's setup page will list the required services.

# Check orchestrator status
expanso-cli status

# List available nodes
expanso-cli node list