Installation Guide

Required operations install_guide

Agent Prompt Snippet

Ensure the project has an installation guide covering supported platforms, package managers, binary downloads, and environment prerequisites.

Purpose

An installation guide documents supported platforms, package manager commands, binary download links, and environment prerequisites so users can install the tool reliably on any system.

This is a Required document — every project of this type should have one. Without it, the team risks misalignment, rework, or undetected issues that compound over time.

Key Sections to Include

Supported platforms
Package managers
Binary downloads
Environment prerequisites

Agent hint: Ensure the project has an installation guide covering supported platforms, package managers, binary downloads, and environment prerequisites.

What Makes It Good vs Bad

A strong version of this document:

Includes runbooks with step-by-step procedures for common incidents
Defines SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets with measurable thresholds
Documents on-call responsibilities and escalation paths
Covers both steady-state operations and failure recovery
Tested regularly through drills or game days

Warning signs of a weak version:

No runbooks — relies on tribal knowledge for incident response
Monitoring defined but no clear thresholds or alerting rules
Missing capacity planning or scaling procedures
Disaster recovery plan that has never been tested
No distinction between informational alerts and actionable pages

Common Mistakes

Writing runbooks that assume expert knowledge of the system
Defining SLOs without buy-in from product and engineering teams
Not testing disaster recovery procedures until an actual disaster occurs
Alerting on everything rather than focusing on user-impacting symptoms

How to Use This Document

Write runbooks as if the person reading them is stressed, sleep-deprived, and unfamiliar with the system — because during an incident, they might be. Use numbered steps, include expected output for each command, and clearly mark decision points. Test runbooks regularly through game days or tabletop exercises.

For AI agents: Reference operations documents when assisting with incident response, capacity planning, or deployment procedures. Verify that proposed infrastructure changes align with documented SLOs and operational constraints.

Starter Template

SpecBase includes a ready-to-use template for this document: kb/templates/operations/install_guide.md.tmpl. Use the SpecBase CLI or MCP integration to generate it pre-filled for your project.

# Generate stubs via CLI
specbase init <archetype> --features <features> --dir ./docs