It looks like the problem is that the cluster hasn’t been “configured”. Each FDB cluster needs to be told some configuration information about what kind of redundancy mode it should be using, what storage engine, etc. We have detailed information about configuration in our documentation.
For local development, you’ll probably want to run:
fdbcli --exec "configure new single memory ; status"
This configures a new database with single replication (as good as you can get with a single instance) and it uses the memory storage engine. (All data are still durable in a memory engine, but the dataset also must fit in memory and is not optimized for quick recovery.) You could substitute “ssd” for “memory” and that would also probably be fine. Most of our client installers do this transparently behind the scenes, so if you do have the debian package, if you so desired, you could find the script where this is invoked, though that’s probably not worth the effort, tbh.