# 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](../contributing/run-from-source.md).

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](../concepts/immutable-deploys.md) 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."