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Getting started

Build one binary, start one local service, create the first administrator, and enroll the first thing you want to monitor—a post.

Compile Watchpost

Watchpost requires the Go toolchain. From the application repository:

go build -o watchpost ./cmd/watchpost
./watchpost

The default listener is 127.0.0.1:8080. For development you can skip the retained binary:

go run ./cmd/watchpost

The early ./watchpost serve form remains accepted for compatibility, but the subcommand is not required.

Choose the data directory and listener

./watchpost --listen 127.0.0.1:8090 --data-dir ./watchpost-data

Flags override WATCHPOST_LISTEN and WATCHPOST_DATA_DIR. Watchpost creates and migrates its SQLite database inside the data directory.

Complete first-run setup

1. Open the local address in a browser.
2. Create the first administrator with a valid email and a password of at least seven characters. Sign in with that email and password; identities are normalized so case differences do not matter.
3. Sign in. Setup and sign-in are deliberately separate and are never shown together.
4. Use Enroll a post to add a host, endpoint, network device, power device, sensor, or storage appliance. The Posts page explains what a post is, the post kinds, and the monitoring methods that can be attached to it.
5. Use Run a check or SNMP devices to verify connectivity.

Setup over a loopback listener is direct. If Watchpost is reachable beyond the loopback interface — or an operator set WATCHPOST_SETUP_TOKEN or WATCHPOST_SETUP_TOKEN_FILE — the first-run form asks for a short-lived bootstrap token printed once to the server console. The token is consumed atomically with the first administrator's creation, only its hash is stored, and it is never returned by any API.

A first HTTP example

Enroll website-production as an HTTP endpoint, then run an HTTP check against https://example.com/health. A successful response records immediate health and latency in the result panel. Scheduled checks and rule evaluation build on the same post identity.

Continue with core concepts, then see collection for the available monitoring paths.