Quick Start
This page assumes a single node is already running on 127.0.0.1:4437. Starting one is a single Docker or Cargo command, see Install. The default node keeps nothing across restarts. For disk-backed persistence, set raft.wal.path (see Configuration). A multi-node cluster also needs server.cluster_id, the same on every node.
Drive the HTTP API with curl from another terminal.
Validate the bucket ID (optional)
Buckets are implicit: a bucket exists once a stream is created in it, so this call is optional. It only validates the bucket ID (201, or 400 for an invalid one):
curl -X PUT http://127.0.0.1:4437/demo
Create a stream
curl -X PUT http://127.0.0.1:4437/demo/hello
Append data
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:4437/demo/hello \
-H 'Content-Type: application/octet-stream' \
--data-binary 'first message'
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:4437/demo/hello \
-H 'Content-Type: application/octet-stream' \
--data-binary 'second message'
Each successful append returns 204 No Content with a Stream-Next-Offset header. Add Producer-Id / Producer-Epoch / Producer-Seq if you need exactly-once retries.
Read everything from the beginning
curl -i 'http://127.0.0.1:4437/demo/hello?offset=-1'
The body contains the appended bytes. Response headers include Stream-Next-Offset, Stream-Up-To-Date, and an ETag.
Subscribe for live updates
Open a second terminal:
curl -N 'http://127.0.0.1:4437/demo/hello?offset=-1&live=sse'
-N keeps curl from line-buffering the SSE stream. Append more data from the first terminal and you'll see it arrive immediately as event: data lines. Binary streams are delivered as raw base64 text in event: data payloads (Stream-Sse-Data-Encoding: base64). See binary SSE for details.
Inspect runtime state
For a multi-node cluster the canonical day-2 tool is ursulactl. It speaks to every node, summarises leadership, and wraps restarts in safe drain and catch-up steps. For a single local node you can either point it at a one-line manifest:
cat > /tmp/local.json <<'JSON'
{"nodes": [{"id": 1, "client_url": "http://127.0.0.1:4437", "host": "127.0.0.1"}]}
JSON
ursulactl status --config /tmp/local.json
Or hit the underlying JSON endpoint directly:
curl http://127.0.0.1:4437/__ursula/metrics
The raw endpoint is also what ursulactl consumes. Use it directly when you want the full snapshot or are building custom tooling.
Next steps
- Deploy a Cluster: the production three-voter shape with Helm
- Configuration: persistence, presets, and S3 cold storage in one place
- ursulactl: the operator CLI you'll use once a cluster is up
- API overview: the HTTP surface Ursula currently exposes
- Streams: the core stream abstraction and lifecycle
- Architecture: thread-per-core, multi-Raft internals