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Two ways in. Both take minutes.

no install

▶ The playground

Run the whole quickstart in your browser — nothing to download, nothing to sign up for. The best first taste if you're skeptical.

self-hosted

⬇ Local install

Your machine, your data — the way you'll actually run it. Pulse is free and self-hosted.

read first

📖 Understand the model

Prefer to know what you're typing? Read the pulse.yaml anatomy first.

Install locally​

Grab Pulse from the download page — a single self-hosted binary (Linux, macOS, Windows) or the desktop app. Everything below is identical whichever route you chose.

The quickstart, step by step​

1 · Boot a local Pulse in dev mode​

pulse server start --dev

Pulse boots locally (HTTP on :9090) and the CLI logs itself in. Leave it running; open a second terminal.

2 · Scaffold the app​

pulse new hello --source webhook --stage rule-based:triage

Creates ./hello with three files: pulse.yaml (the whole app), sample.json (a test event), README.md. The scaffold is already valid — you can deploy before editing anything.

3 · Deploy it​

cd hello
pulse deploy .

Stands up the webhook source, the triage stage, the topic chain hello.in → hello.triage.out, and a typed HTTP API.

4 · Send an event​

pulse events publish --topic hello.in --value @sample.json

5 · Watch it come out the other side​

pulse events tail --topic hello.triage.out

Your event appears, having passed the triage rule. The tail stays live — every future event shows up in real time.

What just happened​

You deployed a real event pipeline, not a script: the source, the stage and the output are independent pieces chained by topics. hello.in and hello.triage.out are durable topics — anything can publish to the first, anything can subscribe to the last. Every app you build from here is this same shape, with more interesting middles.

Next​