Deploy the Navigator

Our firm runs Navigator on Google Cloud. The Foundation gives the recipe away. This workshop stands up your own instance — the same Rust stack our attorneys use, on your own Google Cloud project, for your own community. One command does most of the work: navigator gcp setup, a provisioner written in Rust that talks to Google's REST APIs directly and ships with a dry-run so you can read the whole plan before a single packet leaves your laptop.

Two things to hold up front. This provisions billable Google Cloud resources — a Cloud SQL instance, a GKE Autopilot cluster, three storage buckets — so it is not free, and you should set a budget alert before you begin. And this is a deployment guide for engineers standing up infrastructure. With that said: you can run the same stack we run. Let's stand it up.

Want a free win first? You do not need a cloud account — or a credit card — to see Navigator run. cargo run -p cli -- start-dev-server brings the whole stack up locally in KIND (Postgres, OIDC, storage, the workflow broker, OPA), then source .devx/env and cargo run -p web serves it on localhost. Boot it empty, click around, and only come back here when you want it on the public internet. The full local loop is the kind-local-dev path in docs/RUNBOOK.md.

Set the budget alert before you provision — one command caps the surprise so the bill cannot run away while you learn:

gcloud billing budgets create --billing-account "$BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID" \
  --display-name "Navigator" --budget-amount 200USD \
  --threshold-rule percent=0.5 --threshold-rule percent=0.9

Idle, the stack runs on the order of a small-instance Cloud SQL plus an Autopilot cluster's baseline — budget for it, watch the first invoice, and scale the SQL tier down if it is more than you need.