Telodendria/docs/user/setup.md

Initial Set Up

While Telodendria strives to be extremely simple to deploy and run, in most circumstances a few basic setup steps will be necessary. Telodendria does not have a traditional configuration file like most daemons. Instead, its configuration lives in its database; as such, all configuration happens through the administrator API. This design decision makes Telodendria extremely flexible, because it is possible to re-configure Telodendria without having to manually edit files on the filesystem, thus allowing administrators to secure their server better.

Please follow the instructions followed here carefully in the order they are presented for the best results.

This document assumes that you have installed Telodendria using any of the instructions found in Install. After installation, follow these steps:

1. Start Telodendria. If you installed it via a package or container, consult your operating system or container system's documentation. If you are running Telodendria from a release binary or have built it from source, execute the binary directly. If needed, consult the Usage page for details on how to run Telodendria.
2. Assuming that Telodendria started properly, it will spin up and initialize its database directly with a simple—and, importantly, safe—default configuration, as well as a randomly generated, single-use registration token that grants a user all privileges documented in the Administrator API documentation. Consult the log file for this administrator registration token. By default, the log file is located in the data directory, and is named telodendria.log.
3. Use the registration token to register for an account on the server. This account will be the administrator account. You can do this using the client of your choice, or using tools such as curl or http, following the Matrix specification for registering accounts. The administrator account behaves just like a normal local account that an ordinary user would have registered on the server, except that it also has all privileges granted to it, so it can make full use of the Administrator API.
4. Using the access token granted for the administrator account via the login process, configure Telodendria as descibed in Configuration. See the Administrator API documentation for the configuration endpoint details.

This is the recommended way to set up Telodendria. However, if you wish to bypass the account creation step and want to configure Telodendria by directly writing a configuration file instead of using the administrator API, you can manually create the configuration file in the database before starting Telodendria. Simply create config.json following the description in Configuration, then start Telodendria.

While this alternative method may seem simpler and more convenient to some administrators, it is only so in the short-term. Note that this method is not supported, because it gives no access to the administrator API whatsoever, unless you manually modify the database further to give a user admin privileges, which is error-prone and bypasses some of Telodendria's safety mechanisms.