Get Started

Microbus is built to be driven by a coding agent. The agent does the routine work - scaffolding microservices, generating client stubs and tests, regenerating manifests, walking you through breaking changes - while you focus on the business logic. Bootstrapping, building, testing, deploying, even upgrading the framework are all agent-guided.

You’ll need:

  • Your favorite coding agent (e.g. Claude Code)
  • Go 1.26+
  • NATS (required for high-availability production; optional during development)
  • A SQL database of your choice - PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB, SQL Server (required by the Foreman, which durably persists agentic workflow state)
  • An OpenTelemetry observability stack (optional, e.g. LGTM)

1. Bootstrap a Project

Make a new directory for your project and ask your agent to bootstrap it:

mkdir -p myproject
cd myproject
curl the workflow at https://microbus.io/bootstrap and follow it

The agent walks through the bootstrap workflow, sets up .claude/ rules and skills, creates the project skeleton, wires up main.go, and verifies the build. See Bootstrapping a Project for the resulting layout.

2. Take the Tour (Optional)

The fastest way to see what Microbus can do is to have the agent walk you through the example microservices interactively:

Take me through the agent-guided tour

The tour downloads the example microservices - hello world, a calculator, events, authentication, an agentic credit-flow workflow, a SQL CRUD service - and explains the patterns each one demonstrates. The tour is interactive: stop the agent at any point to ask questions about what you’re seeing, request a deeper dive on a specific pattern, or skip ahead to the example most relevant to your domain. Useful even if you already know what you want to build, because the examples are the reference shape Microbus expects.

3. Pick a Path

From here, you have two paths to start building. Pick the one closer to your domain - or use both, since they share the same fabric.

  • Building Agentic Workflows - multi-step processes with branching, parallel fan-out, human-in-the-loop interrupts, and durable state. Lead with this if your problem is orchestrating a flow that takes minutes to hours and may need a human in the middle.
  • Building a Microservice - build a single microservice that exercises all 6 user-facing features (functional endpoints, web handlers, outbound events, inbound event sinks, configs, tickers). Lead with this if your problem is exposing a service that other services can call, or building out the toolset your agentic workflows invoke.

If you’d rather see a one-prompt example before reading through a full walkthrough, My First Microservice builds a working word-guessing game in two prompts.

The agent guides you through either path. Each step is a focused prompt; the agent codes, tests, and updates the manifest in one pass.

4. Operate Securely

When you’re ready to take a solution to production, the Operating Securely walkthrough covers the production deployment flow - signed credentials, the layered security model, topology decisions, and the operator’s perimeter checklist.

Microbus is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Get involved if you’d like to contribute.

Bootstrapping a Project Forward