Getting Started with Light-Fabric

This guide will help you set up a local development environment for Light-Fabric, including the AI Gateway, Agent Engine, and the management Portal.

Prerequisites

Rust: Latest stable version.
Docker: For running database and backend services.
Node.js: For running the portal-view UI.
Git: To clone the necessary repositories.

Local Development Setup

To run the entire ecosystem locally, use portal-config-loc. Its deployment script downloads released service and UI archives from the configured CDN.

1. Initialize Workspace

Create a unified workspace directory (e.g., ~/lightapi) and clone the core management repositories:

cd ~
mkdir -p lightapi
cd lightapi

# Clone the local deployment configuration
git clone [email protected]:lightapi/portal-config-loc.git

Light-Fabric services are orchestrated via Docker Compose scripts in portal-config-loc. The following command starts the PostgreSQL database and the core services (including the Rust-based components):

cd ~/lightapi/portal-config-loc
./scripts/deploy-local.sh pg rust

3. Import Initial Data

For a full deployment, deploy-local.sh downloads events.zip from the CDN and defaults IMPORT_EVENTS to auto. It imports the extracted events.json only when the event store is empty. Set IMPORT_EVENTS=force only when you intentionally need to replay the released baseline into a non-empty store.

4. Update `/etc/hosts`

The platform uses virtual hosts for local routing. Add the following entry to your /etc/hosts file (replace with your actual local IP if necessary):

127.0.0.1  local.lightapi.net locsignin.lightapi.net

Running the Management Portal

The Light-Portal provides a unified UI for onboarding MCP servers, configuring AI Gateways, and interacting with agents.

cd ~/lightapi
git clone [email protected]:lightapi/portal-view.git
cd portal-view
npm install
npm run dev

Navigate to https://localhost:3000 and log in with your developer credentials.

Cloud Development (Coming Soon)

We are currently preparing a Cloud Development Server. This will allow developers to:

Connect to a shared, high-performance AI Gateway.
Onboard and test MCP servers without a full local installation.
Collaborate on shared agentic workflows and Hindsight memory banks.

Stay tuned for the connection details and onboarding guide for the cloud environment.

Contributing to Light-Fabric

If you are developing for the Rust crates specifically:

cd ~/lightapi
git clone [email protected]:networknt/light-fabric.git
cd light-fabric
cargo build

Light-Fabric Documentation