Prerequisites

Need	Version / note
.NET SDK	10.0.401 (backend/global.json, roll-forward to the latest feature band)
Node.js	24 (frontend/.nvmrc). The web server runs .ts files with Node type stripping
Docker Desktop	Needed for the dev database, integration tests and image builds
Kubernetes	Docker Desktop, Settings, Kubernetes, enable. This provides kubectl and the docker-desktop context
Memory	Give Docker Desktop enough for the cluster, a build, and the pods (limits: api 1 Gi, db 1 Gi, web 128 Mi)
git	Used by the Local Git provider (the API image installs its own)
Optional	kubeconform, oasdiff, actionlint; Playwright browsers (npx playwright install)

Notes on the cluster provisioner

Docker Desktop’s default (kubeadm) cluster shares Docker’s image store, so built images are visible at once. With the kind provisioner, deploy-local.sh detects the containerd runtime and loads the images into the desktop-control-plane / desktop-worker node containers. Scripts only ever use the docker-desktop context.

Connect a database GUI

Connect a database GUI:

• Dev loop: localhost:5432, database, user and password from your .env.
• Kubernetes: kubectl --context docker-desktop -n aide port-forward svc/db 15432:5432, then localhost:15432. The user is aide. The password is POSTGRES_PASSWORD in deploy/k8s/overlays/local/secrets.env.

For Railway deploys only

The Railway CLI (5.49.1 or newer) is needed only to inspect or operate a Railway deployment. See Railway.