5-minute quickstart
KiCI offers two equally-supported quickstart paths. Pick the one that fits your machine — both end with the same working pipeline (orchestrator + agent + your first workflow run visible in the dashboard).
Each guide is split into two parts. Part 1 gets you a green run against your own orchestrator with kici run remote — no GitHub App needed, just sign up, bring up the stack, and run. Part 2 then wires up real GitHub pushes so your team’s commits trigger runs automatically. You can stop after Part 1 and come back to Part 2 whenever you’re ready.
Bring a coding agent
Section titled “Bring a coding agent”Workflows are TypeScript, so a coding agent can write them. KiCI ships its docs in a form an agent reads directly: point yours at llms.txt, or pipe a task bundle straight into its context with kici docs llm (kici docs llm sdk for the authoring API, kici docs llm patterns for recipes). An agent briefed that way can scaffold your first workflow, compile it, and read the failure when it breaks.
If your agent finds that these docs promise something KiCI does not do, that is worth telling us — kici feedback prints how to report it, and Reporting a discrepancy is the full guide.
Option A — Docker / Podman (recommended)
Section titled “Option A — Docker / Podman (recommended)”Two containers brought up with docker compose up -d (orchestrator + PostgreSQL), plus one short-lived agent container spawned per job by the container scaler. Minimal host setup, perfect for a laptop, home server, or a tiny VM. No need to install PostgreSQL or any other system service.
Start with the Docker / Podman quickstart →
Option B — Bare-metal install
Section titled “Option B — Bare-metal install”Native systemd services managed by kici-admin orchestrator install / kici-admin agent install — the orchestrator and agents run as native processes. The backing PostgreSQL runs as a single container by default (one docker compose up -d), or you can install it natively if you’d rather not run a container runtime at all. Best for a long-lived Linux host.
Start with the bare-metal quickstart →
Which should I pick?
Section titled “Which should I pick?”| Docker / Podman | Bare metal | |
|---|---|---|
| Host requirements | docker or podman with compose v2.20+ | systemd, Node.js 24+, PostgreSQL 18 (container — needs docker/podman — or native) |
| First local run (Part 1) | ~5 minutes | ~10 minutes |
| First GitHub run (Part 2) | + ~10 minutes | + ~10 minutes |
| Upgrades | docker compose pull + restart | kici-admin orchestrator restart after npm install -g kici-admin@latest |
| Best for | Quick evaluation, ephemeral hosts | Long-lived production hosts |
If you’re not sure, pick Docker / Podman.
Looking for the laptop-only path?
Section titled “Looking for the laptop-only path?”Both quickstarts deploy a real orchestrator + agent. If you only want to write a workflow and dry-run it on your laptop with no infrastructure, Getting started covers kici preview and kici run <event> --local instead.