Get Started

By the end of this tutorial you will have Henceforth running locally with the schema applied, and you will be logged into both Studio (the admin control plane) and App (the end-user workspace).

TODO(#787): install instructions land with the distribution spec; until then this tutorial assumes a source checkout of henceforth-labs/henceforth, built with the toolchain below.

Prerequisites

Rust (stable toolchain) — rustup.rs
Bun — bun.sh
just — cargo install just or brew install just
Docker or Podman — for running PostgreSQL

1. Start PostgreSQL

just db-up

This starts a PostgreSQL 18 container with SSL enabled.

2. Seed dev users

The server’s bootstrap process automatically creates two seed accounts on first run. You can also run just db-seed to create them manually (before the first server start).

Username	Password	Role
`admin0`	`admin0`	Admin (Studio access)
`user0`	`user0`	Regular user (App access)

3. Install UI dependencies

just ui-install

4. Apply metadata

Start the server and apply the schema:

just serve &
just apply

Stop the background server after apply completes (just stop or Ctrl-C).

5. Run the server

just serve

Dev mode is the default: no master key needed, auth is bypassed with a built-in admin principal, and the embedded UI is served at http://localhost:8080.

6. Log in

Navigate to http://localhost:8080. You will be redirected to the login page.

After login, the UI calls GET /auth/me to determine your role and redirects you to the appropriate surface.

Verify

Log out and sign back in as user0 to confirm you land in App, then again as admin0 to confirm you land in Studio. If either sign-in redirects back to the login page instead of the corresponding surface, re-run just apply and confirm it completed without error before retrying.

What’s next

To model your own data, see Objects, Records, and Fields. To create your first record through the API, see Create records through the API.