9.1 The GUI tour

Included from Basic tier

After this you can: find in the browser everything the lessons taught at the command line — login and the bell, the dashboard's Insights, the estate, the Run form, chains, the governance screens, the Operations area, and the docs.

Before you start — tick each one:

• Lesson 3.1 — Your first change (opschain learn 3.1)

In the GUI: this lesson is the GUI — eight stops, each naming the lesson it recaps.

Everything the previous lessons did in a terminal has a face in the browser. The GUI ships inside the opschain binary and is served at the server's root URL — one download, one process, one port, with the API under /api on the same origin — so if the server you installed in lesson 0.1 is up, the GUI already is: open https://your-server/ and it is there. This is a tour, not a manual, and it is the recap every track ends on: each stop names the screen, what you do there, the CLI verb you already know, and the lesson that taught it. The screen-by-screen reference — every Governance entry, every Operations panel, every Insights panel with its CLI equivalent — is the guide opschain docs getting-started/core-gui-surfaces.

The sidebar is the Dashboard and your Inbox on top, two labelled groups in a fixed order — Estate and Governance — and, at the foot beside the version, Administration (the Operations area) above Documentation. The Inbox is everything waiting on you, one perspective per role — Steps, Approvals, Security reviews, Scheduled — and its count sums exactly the perspectives it shows you. Entries you are not entitled to are not hidden: an entry whose pack the licence lacks shows greyed with a lock and names the pack in its tooltip, so the sidebar is also the map of what a licence would unlock (lesson 1.5).

1. Log in — lessons 0.1, 7.1, 5.5

The root URL lands on the login screen. Sign in with the same username and password opschain login takes — the GUI exchanges them for the same tokens, against the same identity plane. What you see afterwards is your authority, not a fixed menu: the Operations area shows for superusers, the Governance entries for the governance roles and pack entitlements, and a node you may not read is simply not there — the GUI's rendering of lesson 7.1's 404-on-deny. The profile menu (top right) names your login with a chip for the provider it came from, and beside it the notification bell (lesson 5.5) carries your unread count and opens the in-app feed: runs you own finishing or failing, and awaiting your approval with a link to the inbox. Logging out revokes the session's token server-side, audited as api:auth:logout.

The CLI equivalent is opschain login + opschain whoami.

2. The dashboard and its Insights — lessons 5.1, 7.1

The landing page is the Dashboard: the estate's pulse — recent and running activity, failures, what is waiting on a human — with a command-palette search (/search). Its Insights tab is the trend view: a panel grid you arrange per user over the event stream — the security pulse (where lesson 7.1's warn:authz:denied shows up as a line rather than a row), the warnings heat strip, config-change audit, identity lifecycle, approval throughput, automation health, licence refusals, and four pack-gated governance panels — every figure one click from the event rows that produced it.

The CLI equivalents are opschain activities and opschain events stats.

3. The estate — lessons 1.1, 1.3, 5.2, 3.3, 12.1

The projects screen is the estate tree of lesson 1.1: projects open into environments and assets, each node with its template pin and maintenance badge. Every node page is a header and a tab strip in one deliberate order: Activity first and Chains second (what is happening here, and why), then the node's contents, Triggers beside Scheduled activity (event-based and time-based automation are one discipline), Templates beside Git remotes (the action supply chain — lesson 3.3), and Properties and Settings always last, behind the divider — configuration is the reference shelf, not the pulse (lesson 1.3). A project with enrolled agents gains an Agents tab (lesson 12.1); the Infrastructure entry lists the host nodes of lesson 6.4.

The CLI equivalents are opschain nodes list|show, opschain runs list, opschain chains show, opschain properties|settings show.

4. The Run form — lessons 2.1, 4.1, 3.1

An asset's Actions tab lists its template's action catalog — the same catalog opschain actions list prints, each button captioned with the action's summary: — and running one opens the Run form. Declared typed inputs (lesson 2.2) render as real form fields: an enum is a select, a boolean a toggle, a secret a masked secret-vault:// reference. Workflows run the same way from the project's Workflows tab (lesson 4.2).

The CLI equivalent is opschain runs create change|workflow … -i key=value --override k=v.

5. Chains and triage — lesson 5.1

The chains screen renders lesson 5.1's correlation chains as a cascade you can walk — every hop from the first event to the runs it caused, automation's decisions marked on the way. A failing chain's Triage view is the one-command root cause as a screen: the failure classified, the runner attributed (lesson 6.1), each failing hop with its error and log tail.

The CLI equivalents are opschain chains show <correlation-id> and opschain chains triage <correlation-id>.

6. Governance: reviews, audit history, agents — lessons 7.2, 7.4, 10–12

The Governance group is the reviewer's and the security owner's side of the house — gated by governance roles and pack entitlements, never by admin status. Security is lesson 7.2's users, groups and policies, with the security-role grants and git identity policy on its Administration tab (lesson 7.4); Reviews is the governance record — the decided history, the review campaigns and their cadences — while everything held for you (a governed run, a trust raise, a release promotion, a rollover) waits on Inbox → Approvals with the approval context behind each row (lesson 10.3); Audit is the one estate-wide trail, searchable by any text in the event type; the pack entries — evidence and controls, policies and owners, agents, classification — are modules 10–12 as screens.

The CLI equivalents are opschain admin users|groups, opschain approvals list|approve, opschain audit --type-search ….

7. The Operations area — lessons 6, 7.3, 7.5, 8

/admin is the operator console — the deployment itself rather than the estate: the Overview with the emergency halt and quiesce controls (lesson 8.4), Runners and the Queue (lessons 6.1–6.3), Server and Database (lessons 8.5–8.7), Configuration and Settings, Maintenance, Users & Groups and Identity providers (lessons 7.2, 7.5), Agents and Model providers (module 12), Secrets, Transport and Git credentials, Packs, Notifications and Notifications governance (the mandates and delivery evidence of module 11), Licence and Activity. Two conventions the panels share: liveness is honest (online: false always comes with a last-seen age; lesson 6.1), and destructive flows are reason-first — the reason is the audit record.

The CLI equivalents are opschain admin status, opschain admin runners list, opschain admin platform halt.

8. Documentation — lesson 0.3

Below the sidebar, Documentation serves this same embedded corpus in the browser — every lesson and every reference page, at /docs/<slug> — the same text opschain learn and opschain docs print, from the same binary, so it is always the release you are running.

Check yourself

• Where in the GUI do you answer a gate, read a chain, and see the denial events of the last hour — and which lesson taught each?

What you learned

• Every CLI lesson has a screen: login and the bell, the Dashboard's Insights, the estate tabs in pulse-first order, the Run form, chains and triage.
• Governance is gated by roles and packs, not admin status; Inbox is the one waiting-on-you page, Reviews & approvals the record and Audit history the one trail.
• The Operations area is the deployment, panel by panel, with honest liveness and reason-first destructive flows.
• Documentation in the GUI is the same corpus as opschain learn and opschain docs; the screen-by-screen reference is opschain docs getting-started/core-gui-surfaces.

Next: this closes the module The GUI — back to your track (opschain learn).