Installation

Installation of Stoa is performed by your delivery engineer, on-site or coordinated with your infrastructure team. This page covers what to expect, what to prepare, and what to verify after delivery.

What you need to prepare

Before installation, your team should have:

• Hardware ready. See Hardware sizing for the right tier. At minimum: a Linux server with one mid-range GPU and 32GB of RAM.
• A clean Linux host. Ubuntu or another modern Linux distribution. Stoa is delivered as a containerized application, so a working container runtime is the only host-level requirement.
• A subdomain or hostname for the Stoa application, with TLS certificates. If you use an internal certificate authority, your engineer will configure Stoa to trust it.
• Network access between services. Stoa runs as a set of cooperating services on the same host (or hosts). They need to talk to each other on internal addresses.
• Storage for documents and indexes. Plan for at least 100GB to start. KB indexes grow with document volume.
• Identity provider details if you plan to use Active Directory or LDAP. See Active Directory.
• Email server details if you plan to use email notifications. See Email (SMTP).

How delivery works

Your delivery engineer will:

1. Walk through your environment to confirm hardware sizing, networking, and any constraints.
2. Install Stoa on your host. For air-gapped sites, the engineer brings everything required on physical media.
3. Configure the platform with your environment-specific settings: hostname, TLS, identity provider, email server, storage paths, model choices.
4. Run health checks end to end: every internal service responds, the AI model loads, and a sample query returns a cited answer.
5. Create the first admin account and hand it off to you.
6. Walk you through the admin UI so you know where everything lives.

After delivery

Once Stoa is installed and the first admin account exists:

• Sign in and verify the System status page shows everything green. See System status.
• Run through the Quickstart to create your first knowledge base, agent, and chat.
• Configure your identity provider so users can sign in with their existing credentials. See Active Directory.
• Configure email if you want welcome emails and notifications. See Email (SMTP).
• Set your custom branding so the platform shows your organization's name and logo. See Branding.
• Define your roles and permissions so users only see what they should. See Roles & permissions.
• Confirm your audit log is rotating and backed up. See Audit logging and Backups.

Updates

Stoa updates are delivered by your engineering partner, not pulled from a public package repository. For locked-down or air-gapped sites, an engineer travels on-site (or coordinates with your infrastructure team) to apply the update. For internet-connected sites with the optional maintenance license, updates can be staged remotely and applied during a maintenance window.

See Updates & on-site delivery for the full update workflow.

What to do if something fails

If a health check fails or a service doesn't come up:

• Open the System status page and look for the unhealthy service.
• Check the Troubleshooting guide for common issues.
• Contact your delivery engineer. Installation issues are not something you should be debugging alone.

Next

• Hardware sizing if you're still planning capacity.
• Active Directory to wire up SSO.
• Quickstart to take Stoa for a spin.