Running locally

As the developers of Cerbforce began their investigation of the system, the first step was getting a Cerbos instance up and running locally.

Container

If you have Docker, you can simply use the published images. The container already ships with a default configuration that has a disk driver configured to look for policies mounted at /policies. Create an empty policy folder at policies/, and then run the following:

    docker run --rm --name cerbos -t 
      -v $(pwd)/policies:/policies 
      -p 3592:3592 
      ghcr.io/cerbos/cerbos:latest server
    ```

## Binary

Alternatively, if you don’t have Docker running, you can opt to use the release binary directly which you can download from [here](https://docs.cerbos.dev/cerbos/prerelease/installation/binary).

### Config file

In order to run the binary, you’ll need to create a minimal server configuration file. The simplest configuration to get up and running (using a local folder for storage of policies) requires only the port and location to be set:

```yaml
    ---
    server:
      httpListenAddr: ":3592"
    storage:
      driver: "disk"
      disk:
        directory: policies
    ```

Save this configuration to a file named `.cerbos.yaml`. You’ll also need to create an empty policy folder `policies/`.

Now, extract the binary and run:

```sh
    ./cerbos server --config=.cerbos.yaml
    ```

Once started you can open `http://localhost:3592` to see the API documentation.