Installing kixctl

There's no one-command install yet. The intended way to run kixctl — an appliance you boot that installs itself, with Incus invisible underneath — is on the roadmap and isn't here.

Today, running kixctl means running it from source, and that path is for people working on kixctl itself rather than for a quick evaluation: you provision Postgres and Valkey, get onto an Incus cluster, and run the control plane and its workers by hand. It's documented under Running from source.

If you're here to evaluate kixctl rather than develop it, the low-friction paths — the appliance, and a hosted try-it — are still ahead. Until they land, Concepts is the clearest way to understand what kixctl does and decide whether it's worth following.

The appliance (roadmap)

The intended distribution is an appliance: boot an image, kixctl installs itself, a first-run wizard sets it up, and Incus sits invisible underneath. It is built on the same NixOS image machinery that already produces the immutable application images, so a bootable, self-installing build continues what's there rather than starting something separate. It is the item that turns "run it from source" into "boot it and go."