How long does standing up a CA take — a quarter, a project team, a vendor engagement? With goca the honest number is about fifteen minutes, and at the end of it you have more than a login page: a running system, a changed admin password, a real CA hierarchy with a test certificate issued, and a verified audit chain. The claims you just read stop being claims here.
The prerequisites list is short on purpose: Docker with Compose v2 (the only supported way to run the local bundle), about 1 GB of disk for images and the Postgres volume — and nothing else. No external services, no internet access after the image build.
cd goca # the evaluation bundle from the download you received docker compose up --build
That starts two containers: goca-db (PostgreSQL 16) and goca — the entire CA in a single process. A third, short-lived container applies the schema first — services wait for it. When the log line starting role api-admin (management plane) on :8081 appears, the system is up.
Now I can bring up goca from nothing and recognize the log line that says it's alive.