Getting Started

This section is the on-ramp. In four short pages you install Aperture, learn the vocabulary the rest of the book assumes, and make your first access-control decision two ways — from the command line and from Go.

Everything here runs against Aperture’s embedded example model, a self-contained fixture for the tenant acme. You need nothing but the built binary; there is no store to provision and no data to load.

Read in order

1. Installation — build bin/aperture from source (Go 1.26.1, pure-Go, CGO_ENABLED=0).
2. Concepts primer — principals, actions, objects, patterns and specificity, rules, scopes, and accounts: enough to read any later chapter.
3. First decision (CLI) — a runnable aperture check walkthrough showing an allow, a default deny, and a deny-override.
4. Library quickstart — the same decision from a minimal Go program embedding the engine.

Already know what Aperture is? Skip to Installation. Want the big picture first? See the Introduction.