# Get Started

Lerma is the FourIA customer dashboard: a **Phoenix LiveView** application for
provisioning tenant applications, tracking health and cost analytics, and
managing credit-based billing. It runs on Hetzner VMs behind Cloudflare Access
and stores its data in PostgreSQL (Supabase in production).

This guide orients you before you write any code. For a step-by-step path to a
running environment, continue to [First Steps](first-steps.html).

## What you need

| Tool | Why |
| ---- | --- |
| **Elixir 1.20 / OTP 29** | The Phoenix application runtime. |
| **Docker** | Runs the local `postgres:16-alpine` database. |
| **PostgreSQL client** | Inspecting the local database (optional). |
| **Cloudflare account** | Only for the full Cloudflare Access login flow. |
| **OpenTofu + Ansible** | Only when provisioning or deploying infrastructure. |

The repository root provides everything through Nix: run `nix develop .#lerma`
from the repo root.

## How Lerma fits together

- **Dashboard** — LiveView pages plus a JSON API under `/api`.
- **Data** — Ecto schemas backed by PostgreSQL (`Lerma.Repo`).
- **Cloudflare** — Access JWT verification for every browser request, and the
  Cloudflare API for provisioning per-tenant resources.
- **Infrastructure** — OpenTofu provisions the VM, database, DNS, and Access
  app; Ansible configures the VM and deploys the container. See
  [Infrastructure as Code](readme.html#infrastructure-as-code) in the README.

## Where to go next

- [First Steps](first-steps.html) — get the app running locally.
- [Deployment](deploy.html) — the full OpenTofu + Ansible runbook.
- [README](readme.html) — configuration, Cloudflare token permissions, AI
  Gateway handling, and R2 backup credentials.