Skip to content

Setup Wizard

Installing Eight.ly OS

Before the setup wizard, you install the OS onto the machine. That's a separate, seven-step process — Welcome, Disk, Name, Network, Remote access, Confirm, Install — covered in full on Installing Eight.ly OS. Boot the installer (USB/ISO or netboot), walk those seven steps, and reboot into the installed system.

Nova models are pre-staged

Nova's AI models ship with the OS image, so there are no downloads at first boot — Nova answers as soon as you reach the dashboard.

When you boot Eight.ly OS for the first time, the setup wizard walks you through initial configuration. The whole process takes about 10 minutes.

URL: http://eightly.local:8080 (or your server's IP on port 8080)

Before the wizard: creating your admin account

The setup wizard isn't the first thing you see. On a fresh install the dashboard detects that no admin account exists yet and shows a create admin screen first — pick a username and password. That account is created and you're logged in immediately; there is no default login to change. Only then are you dropped into the wizard below.

Pick a strong password here

This is the only account with full admin access, and there's no default to fall back on if you forget it.

The wizard is mandatory until it's done

The wizard opens full-screen every time you land on the box until every applicable step is finished — closing it with the footer's Later button doesn't skip anything, it just reopens where you left off next time you're routed here. Individual optional steps (Monitoring, One-Click Deploy) also have their own explicit skip button, which does count as finishing that step.

Step 1: Theme

Pick a theme from a searchable gallery, filterable by dark, light, or high-contrast. Selecting one applies and saves it immediately.

Step 2: Storage

Choose your storage architecture and the wizard creates the pool right here, inline — this isn't just a type picker:

  • SnapRAID + MergerFS ("Media Server") — pool any mix of drive sizes into one logical volume with parity protection. Best for mixed-size drives and general NAS use.
  • ZFS ("Professional") — copy-on-write with inline checksums and native snapshots. Wants matched drive sizes per vdev. Disabled here if the ZFS packages aren't available on your install.

Which one should you pick?

Choose ZFS if your drives are the same size and you want checksumming, snapshots, and real-time redundancy. Choose SnapRAID + MergerFS if your drives are mixed sizes — ZFS is limited by the smallest drive in each vdev, MergerFS uses every byte.

Both wizards run the same guided drive selection you'd get from Storage Management: health-badged drives (green/yellow/red), data + parity + optional cache picks for SnapRAID, or a topology pick (mirror/raidz1/raidz2/raidz3) for ZFS.

Step 3: Cache Drive

What this step does depends on what you picked in Step 2:

  • SnapRAID + MergerFS — pick an SSD/NVMe drive as a write cache. Writes land on the cache first and drain to the array on a schedule (the cache mover), instead of hitting spinning disks directly.
  • ZFS — this step is a no-op. ZFS's equivalent is the pool's L2ARC, which you configure inside the ZFS pool wizard in Step 2, not here.

Step 4: Network

The installer already pinned your IP (DHCP or static, set during install — see Installing Eight.ly OS), so this step isn't about IP configuration. It's about how the dashboard gets reached from outside your LAN: pick a reverse proxy, a domain name, and an SSL provider. Traefik and None are the two choices. (Nginx Proxy Manager and SWAG are planned; a box that was set to one of them earlier still shows it, greyed out.)

Step 5: Security & Auth

Configure how logins are protected:

  • Auth provider — Authelia (the only one currently implemented; Authentik and Keycloak are listed but not yet wired up)
  • Authelia URL, session timeout
  • Require Two-Factor Authentication toggle
  • Default access policy — bypass / one-factor / two-factor / deny

This step also surfaces API Keys, TLS cert pins, the authorization audit log, and SSH access settings — the same panels you'll find later under Settings > Security.

Step 6: Backup Strategy

Set up both halves of your backup plan:

  • Local backup — schedule, destination, retention
  • Remote provider — Local-only, or connect to Eight.ly Backup Server (EBS), with a connection-test button right in the wizard

Step 7: Monitoring (optional, skippable)

Enable the bundled monitoring stack — Prometheus, Grafana, node-exporter, cAdvisor, Alertmanager — with a single toggle. This step has its own Skip this step button; skipping it doesn't exit the wizard, it just moves you to Step 8. You can turn monitoring on later from Settings > Monitoring.

Step 8: One-Click Deploy (optional, skippable)

Deploy Traefik + Authelia (SSL + SSO/2FA) for your apps in one click, or choose "Finish without deploying — I'm running locally" to skip it and land on the dashboard. Either choice completes the wizard.

After Setup

Finishing Step 8 marks onboarding complete server-side and takes you to the dashboard. From here you have full access to:

Revisiting setup options later

There's no dashboard "QuickStart" panel that reappears after first run. To re-run the same wizard voluntarily — say, to reconfigure monitoring or backup — go to Settings > General and toggle "Show Quick Start Wizard." Reopening it this way gives you a normal close button, since onboarding is already complete; it's only the very first run that's locked open.