Guides

Task-oriented walkthroughs of patchpanel. These complement the Configuration reference (every YAML key) and the API reference (every endpoint).

Available guides

Getting Started

Day-zero walkthrough: install patchpanel, claim the admin account from the postinst banner, run the onboarding wizard to land at a working HAProxy with a covering Let’s Encrypt cert. Plus CLI cheatsheet and the common first-week gotchas.

Installation

Sysadmin-grade reference for production installs. Adds the STARTcloud apt repository, walks through every systemd hardening flag and on-disk artifact, and covers upgrades, uninstalls, and disaster recovery (snapshots, audit-DB backups, locked-admin recovery via the CLI).

Authentication

The three auth strategies (local, ha-ingress, none), the API token wire format, the setup-token handshake, JWT lifecycle and password-change invalidation, and how to recover from a lost admin via shell access.

Backend Integration

Programmatic patchpanel — mint a Bearer token, work with the state document via read-modify-write, automate cert renewals, drain backend servers via runtime ops without a reload, scrape stats for Prometheus, and ship audit events to your SIEM. Plus CI/CD recipes for GitHub Actions, Ansible, and Terraform-style flows.

API Examples

A curl-by-example walkthrough of every public endpoint, organised by domain (auth, state, certificates, runtime, observability, cluster, misc). Companion to the interactive Swagger UI at /api/.

Where else to look

  • Architecture — components, data flow, the render pipeline, the state machine, the audit log.
  • Configuration — every key in config.yaml, what reads it, and the migrator / watermark lifecycle.
  • Releases — downloads + changelog.
  • Support — issue tracker, security policy, code of conduct.

Need something the docs don’t cover yet? Open an issue.

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