Start Guide

Fluffy helps teams declare, verify, and orchestrate distributed infrastructure topologies without configuration drift or manual cloud plumbing. This guide gets you from zero to running verified topologies quickly.

#Overview and demo

Start here if you want to understand the layout and core workflows before setting anything up.

• Interactive Topology Graph: Explore our live topology visualizer to see how services, stateful databases, event topics, and IAM bindings fit together.
• Core Architecture Walkthrough: Discover how declarative manifests translate into deterministic local emulation and zero-drift cloud environments.
• Private Previews Demo: See how pull-request preview environments lease isolated cloud resources with automatic TTL expiration.

#Create a workspace

Once you've seen the basics, the next step is installing the Fluffy CLI and configuring a workspace for how your team works.

#1. Install the Fluffy CLI

Install the precompiled binary via curl or build from source:

1# Install precompiled binary for macOS / Linux
2curl -fsSL https://getfluffychainsaw.dev/install.sh | sh 
3 
4# Or install with Go toolchain
5go install github.com/getfluffychainsaw/core/cmd/fluffy-chainsaw@latest 

Verify your installation:

1fluffy-chainsaw --version 

#Initialize your topology

Create a new workspace directory containing a standard fluffy-chainsaw.workspace.yaml manifest:

1fluffy-chainsaw init storefront 
2cd storefront 

A minimal manifest declares capabilities rather than low-level cloud provider plumbing:

1apiVersion: fluffy-chainsaw.dev/v1
2kind: ApplicationTopology
3metadata:
4  name: storefront
5spec:
6  services:
7    - name: api-gateway
8      runtime: nodejs20
9      consumes:
10        - ref: orders-db
11        - ref: payment-events
12  databases:
13    - name: orders-db
14      engine: postgres
15      version: "16"
16  topics:
17    - name: payment-events

#Resolve and test locally

Topology resolution validates capability contracts, binding constraints, and provider topologies across all declared environments:

1# Validate capability bindings and dependency tree
2fluffy-chainsaw experimental resolve \ 
3  --application storefront \ 
4  --environment local 

Start your local emulator suite with hot-reloading:

1fluffy-chainsaw local --application storefront --dev 

#Getting the most out of Fluffy

#Platform Engineers and Admins

• Manifest Specification: Learn how to declare complex multi-service topologies, persistent databases, and ingress routing.
• Private Preview Environments: Connect your GitHub CI pipeline to spawn isolated staging environments per pull request.
• CLI Command Matrix: Complete command-line flag reference and CI/CD automation rules.

#Application Developers

• Generated Type-Safe SDKs: Auto-generate fully typed TypeScript, Go, and Python client bindings for all declared backend resources.
• Diagnostic & Troubleshooting Guide: Quick solutions for topology conflicts, binding mismatches, and container daemon issues.

#Learn from real examples

Explore our reference repository architectures and open-source examples:

• Visit our Core Engine on GitHub to inspect runtime adapters and emulator implementations.
• Explore the Storefront Architecture Example for an end-to-end multi-service topology with PostgreSQL and Pub/Sub.