# Happy Paths — Operator

Five paths across the operator surface: bringing the stack up locally,
putting a daemon on a remote host, declarative cluster management, cloud
provisioning, and watching it all from the dashboard.

These are the paths that exercise *everything together*. If they are
green, the system can be trusted with real workloads.

## The list

| # | Path | Verifies |
| - | ---- | -------- |
| 03 | [Hello, local stack](/admin/happy-paths/03-hello-local-stack.md) | Control plane + Mongo + nymph on `localhost` via mprocs |
| 08 | [Bootstrap a daemon on a remote host](/admin/happy-paths/08-bootstrap-daemon-remote.md) | `lakeshore daemon install` onto a bare SSH host |
| 12 | [Compose a cluster declaratively](/admin/happy-paths/12-compose-cluster.md) | `lakeshore up` / `down` against a `lakeshore.yaml` |
| 13 | [Cloud provider launch](/admin/happy-paths/13-cloud-provider-launch.md) | EC2 / GCE / Kube provisioning through the control plane |
| 14 | [Dashboard observability](/admin/happy-paths/14-dashboard-observability.md) | Reactive view of an in-flight invocation |

## Cross-surface prerequisites

| For path | You also need green |
| -------- | ------------------- |
| 08 | [07 · SSH provider smoke](/cli/happy-paths/07-ssh-provider-smoke.md) |
| 12 | A provider registered, plus its credentials as secrets |
| 13 | Cloud credentials stored as a Lakeshore secret |
| 14 | A submitted invocation — pick any from [Python SDK](/python-sdk/happy-paths.md) |

## The cascade

`03` is the foundation — everything else assumes you can stand the stack
up. `08` proves daemon-on-remote bootstrap, which the cloud paths later
automate. `12` is the declarative story. `13` is the most complex and the
only one that spends real money, so verify it last, not first. `14` ties
it together by showing the system from the user's reactive view.

→ Switch surface: [Python SDK](/python-sdk/happy-paths.md) · [CLI](/cli/happy-paths.md)