Deployment Overview

Pilot is a single Go binary with minimal runtime dependencies. This section covers deployment options from local development to production cloud environments.

Requirements

To run Pilot, you need:

Requirement	Description
Pilot binary	Single Go binary, no runtime dependencies
Git	Installed and configured with credentials
Claude Code CLI	Or alternative backend (Qwen Code, OpenCode) — see Execution Backends
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	API key for Claude (or equivalent for your backend)
GITHUB_TOKEN	Or equivalent for your PM adapter (GitLab, Azure DevOps, Linear, Jira)
Network access	Outbound to GitHub/GitLab API + Anthropic API

Optional

~/.pilot/config.yaml for customization
SQLite (embedded, no setup needed) for persistence
Cloudflare/ngrok for webhook tunneling

Deployment Options

Choose the deployment method that fits your infrastructure:

Platform	Best For	Guide
Local / Bare Metal	Development, single-server setups	systemd, launchd
Docker	Container environments, local testing	Dockerfile, Compose
Docker & Helm	Production containers + Kubernetes	Full image, Compose, Helm chart
Kubernetes	Production clusters, manifests	Manifests, health probes, PVC
AWS	AWS infrastructure	EC2, ECS/Fargate
Google Cloud	GCP infrastructure	GCE, Cloud Run
Azure	Azure infrastructure	Container Apps, VMs

Supporting Guides

Topic	Description
Monitoring	Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, alerting
Networking	Gateway config, tunnels, reverse proxy, webhooks

Quick Start

The fastest way to get Pilot running:


# Download binary
curl -L https://github.com/anthropics/pilot/releases/latest/download/pilot-$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')-$(uname -m | sed 's/x86_64/amd64/').tar.gz | tar xz
mv pilot ~/.local/bin/
 
# Set environment variables
export GITHUB_TOKEN="ghp_..."
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..."
 
# Run
pilot start --github

For production deployments, continue to the platform-specific guides.