The demo

A fresh server has nothing on it, and an empty dashboard is where most trials end. KASL_DEMO=true fills an empty database with a fictional team — three departments, twelve people, eight weeks of days — so the dashboards can be seen before an agent is installed on anybody’s machine:

$ KASL_DEMO=true docker compose up -d        # or: KASL_DEMO=true cargo run
$ docker compose logs server
2026-08-29T18:14:37.667958Z  INFO kasl_server: database schema is up to date version=20260830000001
2026-08-29T18:14:39.401685Z  INFO kasl_server: seeded the demo team people=12 departments=3 days=386

  This is a demo: a fictional team, nothing here is real. Sign in as

      manager   priya.raman@example.com          Priya Raman
      employee  tomas.verhoeven@example.com      Tomas Verhoeven
      admin     sam.whitfield@example.com        Sam Whitfield

  with the password `kasl-demo`. The same password opens every account.

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/health
{"database":"ok","demo":true,"status":"ok","version":"0.20.0"}

The login screen offers the same three accounts as buttons, and every screen carries a banner saying the data is invented.

The days are shaped so that everything the dashboard knows how to show is on it at once: someone steady, someone working ten-hour days, someone whose hours shrink week by week, a day open right now, an agent that went silent a week ago, one that never reported, and an administrator with no agent at all. The history ends yesterday whenever you start it, and two demos started on the same day show the same numbers, so a screenshot can be reproduced.

The live status is on it too: somebody working, somebody on a break, agents idle between days, and two machines that have stopped answering. A demo is seeded once but a pulse is believed for three minutes, so the demo re-stamps its own — keeping the stopped agents stopped, and leaving alone any real kasl pointed at it. A demo seeded before the pulse existed gets its own on the next start, so upgrading the image is enough.

The team keeps reaching today. The history is generated from the day it is seeded, and nothing moves it afterwards — so a stand left running for a fortnight would show a team that stopped working a fortnight ago, every row reading “no days recorded for 16 days”. That is a truthful description of the data and a false one of the product. When the newest day falls more than two days behind, the next start throws the fictional team away and generates it again from today. Two days rather than one, so an ordinary weekend is not staleness: this team works weekdays, and on a Sunday its newest day is rightly Friday’s.

Regenerating loses whatever a visitor clicked — an alert they dismissed, a password they changed. On a demo that is not a loss, and it is also what keeps the stand current for free: whatever a later version adds to the seed appears here by itself, because the stand is not mended field by field, it is born again.

The demo refuses a database that already holds accounts. Twelve invented people alongside a real team, with nothing to say which rows are which, is the one outcome worse than no demo — so a flag left in a file after a trial stops the server with a message rather than turning the installation into one. A database the demo itself seeded starts normally, with or without the flag, and keeps its banner: the mark lives in the database, not in the environment.

The agents’ tokens are demo-<firstname> — demo-tomas, for instance — so a real kasl can be pointed at the demo and its days appear next to the invented ones. Every address is under example.com, which is reserved: the names are made up, and the domain guarantees the addresses are too.