Install with Docker

Docker is the fastest way to get a Sentinel instance running, and a good fit for evaluation or a single-node deployment.

Prerequisites

Docker installed on the host.

That's it to get running — Sentinel self-configures on first start and doesn't require an external database up front. See Databases if you want to point it at an external engine instead of the default embedded storage.

Without a license key, Sentinel runs on an automatic 30-day trial — a license is required beyond that for production use. See License for how to configure LICENSE_KEY.

Run the container

The image is published to three registries; use whichever is fastest to reach from your infrastructure.

ghcr.io/altcha-org/sentinel — GitHub Container Registry
public.ecr.aws/n6m6b4n8/altcha-org/sentinel — AWS ECR
ccr.ccs.tencentyun.com/altcha-org/sentinel — Tencent Cloud (China)

Both amd64 and arm64 are supported and selected automatically.

docker run -d \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v altcha_sentinel_data:/data \
  ghcr.io/altcha-org/sentinel:latest

The /data volume holds Sentinel's configuration and data, including an auto-generated .env file with cryptographically secure random secrets — mount it to a persistent volume so you don't lose it on container restart.

Once running, open http://localhost:8080 and sign in with the default credentials root / root. Change this password immediately after first login.

For TLS termination directly on the container, resource limits, and other configuration, see ENV Variables — or terminate TLS at a proxy in front of it, see Reverse Proxy.

Production configuration

A single container works out of the box on the embedded database — good for evaluation, but production deployments should run multiple instances for redundancy, which needs four variables set identically on every container:

docker run -d \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v altcha_sentinel_data:/data \
  -e SECRET_SEED="<a long random string, identical on every node>" \
  -e LICENSE_KEY="<license key>" \
  -e POSTGRES_URL="postgresql://user:password@your-db-host:5432/altcha_sentinel" \
  -e REDIS_URL="redis://default@your-redis-host:6379" \
  ghcr.io/altcha-org/sentinel:latest

See Clustering for what each variable does, and ENV Variables for the full reference.

Next steps

Configure — set up your first Security Group and API Key.
Reverse Proxy — put Sentinel behind HTTPS for production.
Monitoring & Logging — track Sentinel's health once it's live.