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Quickstart Installation

The minimum to get started with LittleHorse is to install the lhctl CLI, run the server in docker, and use your choice of the Java, GoLang, or Python client libraries.

tip

For fast responses, we recommend you join our LittleHorse Community Slack Workspace to exchange ideas about and receive support for LittleHorse.

Your system will need:

  • brew or go to install lhctl (if you use go, make sure to put ~/go/bin in your PATH).
  • docker to run the LH Server.
  • Either go, java, or python to run the client libraries.

LittleHorse CLI​

First, install lhctl, the LittleHorse CLI.

Installation via Homebrew has been tested on Mac and Linux.

brew install littlehorse-enterprises/lh/lhctl

LittleHorse Server (Local Dev)​

The easiest way to run the LittleHorse Server is using the lh-standalone docker image. You can do so as follows:

docker run --name littlehorse -d -p 2023:2023 -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/littlehorse-enterprises/littlehorse/lh-standalone:0.11.2

Note that the lh-standalone image is only suitable for local development. Once the container is up and running, you should be able to verify that the server is working as follows:

-> lhctl version
lhctl version: 0.11.2 (Git SHA homebrew)
Server version: 0.11.2
info

The lh-standalone image takes some time to start up since it first starts a Kafka Broker process before starting the LH Server process. If your lhctl search wfSpec command fails at first, keep trying for about 20-40 seconds until Kafka is ready.

You should be able to access the LH Developer Dashboard at http://localhost:8080/ after the lh-standalone image has started up.

LittleHorse Client Libraries​

All the LittleHorse Client libraries, including grpc clients, can be accessed through standard installation mechanisms in a language of your choice.

The Java Client Library is available on Maven Central. To add it as a dependency to your project, simply put the following in your build.gradle (or do the equivalent with your pom.xml)

  implementation 'io.littlehorse:littlehorse-client:0.11.2'

Get Started​

You can use one of the LittleHorse QuickStarts to get going really fast:

Additional rich examples can be found at our core GitHub repository.