# Quickstart

Go from signing in to a live service in about ten minutes. Setting up your account takes three steps — sign in, claim a handle, verify your phone — and drops you on an empty board. Deploying is the next thing you do, and it is deliberate: nothing ships until you ask for it.

Bring a GitHub repository, a container image, or a project directory on your machine. No credit card is required.

## 1. Sign in with Google

Open the Koo console and press **Continue with Google**. Google is the only sign-in method — there are no passwords on Koo.

## 2. Claim your handle

Your handle is your namespace on Koo: it names your account, and your public [profile](/docs/showcase/your-profile) and any app pages you later publish live under it. Handles are unique and claimed first come, first served.

Type a handle — the form checks availability as you type — accept the Terms of Service, and press **Continue**.

## 3. Verify your phone

Koo calls your phone and reads a 6-digit code aloud. Enter your number, press **Call me**, pick up, and type the code. If the call doesn't reach you, the code screen offers **Call again** — and, where SMS is available, **Text me a code** to get the code by text instead.

After the code checks out, your recovery codes appear.

> **Warning:**
>
> Recovery codes are shown once — copy them somewhere safe. Each works a single time if you lose access to your phone; if you lose the codes themselves, **Regenerate recovery codes** in your account's security settings mints a fresh set and invalidates the old one.

Press **Finish setup**.

## 4. Land on your board

Finishing setup takes you straight to a board. Koo creates your first [project and its production environment](/docs/projects/projects-and-environments) for you and opens the production board — an environment canvas with one node per service, empty for now. The project gets a placeholder name you can change in project settings.

The board is where you come back to. In the console it is at `/board`, which always reopens the board you last had open.

## 5. Deploy your first service

Press **New service** on the board and pick how to deploy:

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Set the **Port** your service listens on inside its container.

Creates are [staged](/docs/projects/staged-changes): the new service appears as a ghost node until you press **Deploy** on the changes bar.

> **Note:**
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> One web service plus one Postgres and one Redis database — 0.5 vCPU / 1 GiB each — are the always-free allowance on your first account, free forever, no card. See [the free tier](/docs/get-started/free-tier).

## 6. Watch the deploy

Open your web service's drawer and go to the **Deployments** tab. A deploy that builds from source moves through `queued` → `building` → `built` → `applied`; a deploy that ships an existing image skips the build statuses. See [Deployments & rollback](/docs/deploy/deployments-and-rollback).

`applied` finishes the pipeline, not the boot. The service's health walks from **In progress** to **Online** as your container starts — see [status](/docs/observability/status).

## 7. Open your live URL

An exposed web service gets a public HTTPS URL once it is Online, shown on the service. Open it in your browser.

## 8. Read your logs

Open the drawer's **Logs** tab to stream your service's output live — the first place to look if the URL didn't return what you expected. See [Logs](/docs/observability/logs).

## 9. Add a database

Press **New service** on the board and choose **Database**. Your web service reads it through its connection variable — `DATABASE_URL` for Postgres, `REDIS_URL` for Redis — and you can rename either to whatever name your code reads. See [Postgres](/docs/databases/postgres) for what a database on Koo includes.

## 10. Publish your app page (optional)

Nothing you deploy is public on the showcase until you publish it. When you're ready to show your work, [publish an app](/docs/showcase/publish-your-app) from the board: you get a public page at `koo.io/@handle/app-slug` — it exists only after you publish — with a description, media, comments, and upvotes.

## Next steps

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