An Oxide inspired mini cloud for a couple of home machines. Rust, plain systemd daemons.

• kiln/ the control plane: SQLite source of truth, placement, user API
• ingot/ the node agent: runs on every compute node, reconciles libvirt toward desired state
• cu/ the command line client
• api/ wire types shared by all three

See docs/design.md for the decisions so far and docs/roadmap.md for what comes next.

Install

One machine runs kiln. Name it kiln on your tailnet so every node finds it by default. The installer also adds Ubuntu 24.04 to kiln's image catalogue, which nodes download from by hash. The tailnet is copper's network: kiln listens on it, nodes and people reach kiln over it, and VMs live on copper's own 10.42.0.0/16, a /24 per node, rather than on any site's LAN. That works the same whether a node sits on your home router or anywhere else.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Shreyas220/copper/main/install.sh | sudo sh -s -- kiln
sudo -u copper kiln --db /var/lib/copper/kiln.db token --user you --role admin

Every compute node runs ingot. It needs libvirt, qemu-utils and cloud-image-utils, but no local images.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Shreyas220/copper/main/install.sh | sudo sh -s -- ingot

An Apple silicon Mac becomes a node with Tart instead of libvirt. Run this as the user that stays logged in; it installs Homebrew, Tart, QEMU and ingot as a LaunchAgent. Re-run it with --update to upgrade. The Tart backend is a preview and has not yet run on a real Mac.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Shreyas220/copper/main/dist/macos/prepare.sh | sh -s -- --kiln http://kiln:8400

Mac guests are arm64, so give kiln an arm64 image once, on the kiln machine:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Shreyas220/copper/main/install.sh | sudo sh -s -- kiln --image-arch aarch64

Then approve the node and make a VM:

export CU_URL=http://kiln:8400 CU_TOKEN=cu_...
cu node ls && cu node approve <id>
cu project create default
cu key add                         # save ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub, or `cu key new` to make a key
cu create web --vcpus 2 --memory 2048
cu ls
cu ssh web                         # through kiln and the VM's node, from anywhere
cu forward web 8080                # its port 8080 at localhost:8080
cu ssh-config web >> ~/.ssh/config # then: scp file web.copper:
cu stop web --wait && cu resize web --memory 4096 --disk 20 && cu start web
cu log web                         # what happened to it, newest first
cu node set <id> --cpu-ratio 4     # admin: let 8 threads back 32 vCPUs

install.sh --help lists the options, including --binaries target/release to install a local build.

Console

Kiln serves a web console on the same address as its API: http://kiln:8400. Nobody signs up; an admin sends invite links from the console. The first admin's link comes from the kiln machine:

sudo -u copper kiln --db /var/lib/copper/kiln.db invite --user you --role admin --url http://kiln:8400

The console shows instances with their history, live metrics and a serial console, plus nodes, images, quotas, users and tokens. cu keeps using tokens.