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Installation

Tessera deploys into your own AWS account with Terraform. This page covers the prerequisites and the one-time setup to stand the platform up. For the full, step-by-step infrastructure walkthrough, see the repository's docs/deployment/local-deployment.md.

Prerequisites​

  • Terraform ≥ 1.11 (S3-native state locking)
  • AWS CLI v2, authenticated to your target account
  • Python 3.12 and pip
  • Node.js 20+ and npm (Node 22 recommended)
  • jq, zip, openssl
  • The agentcore CLI — pip install bedrock-agentcore-starter-toolkit
  • Amazon Bedrock model access enabled in your region for the models in var.models

Your AWS principal needs permission to create the full resource set (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, WAF, Cognito, KMS, SQS, SNS, VPC, Step Functions, EventBridge, IAM, Verified Permissions, Bedrock/AgentCore, Secrets Manager).

One-time setup​

# 1. Authenticate to AWS
export AWS_PROFILE=your-profile

# 2. Create your env file and set AWS_PROFILE / AWS_REGION / ENVIRONMENT
cp .env.example .env

# 3. Set the region in the environment's tfvars (Terraform reads var.region, not AWS_REGION)
#    infra/environments/<env>/terraform.tfvars  ->  region = "us-east-1"

# 4. Create the Terraform state bucket and wire it into every backend.hcl
make bootstrap

# 5. Store the web-search API key (required — enable_websearch = true by default).
#    Get a free key from https://app.tavily.com/ then:
make set-websearch-key ENV=dev
tip

To ship without web search, set enable_websearch = false in infra/environments/<env>/terraform.tfvars and skip step 5.

Deploy the platform​

# Package the Lambdas, then run Terraform directly
make package
source scripts/load-env.sh          # exports AWS creds + $TF_BACKEND / $TF_VARS
cd infra
terraform init  $TF_BACKEND
terraform plan  $TF_VARS
terraform apply $TF_VARS
cd ..

# Deploy the AgentCore runtime, then re-apply to wire its ARN
make deploy-agent
cd infra && terraform apply $TF_VARS && cd ..

# Publish the frontend, seed content, and create the first admin
make deploy-frontend
make seed
make create-admin EMAIL=you@example.com

# Print the URL to open
terraform -chdir=infra output -raw frontend_url

Once make seed finishes, every bundled ecosystem is compiled and available in the UI. Continue to the Quick Start to launch your first run.

note

make seed publishes content and compiles ecosystems (fast). Populating the catalog from domain sources is a separate, longer step — make ingest — covered under Catalog.