Quick Start

The simplest way to interact with the platform is to install the kraft tool:

Linux

curl -sSfL https://get.kraftkit.sh | sh

macOS

brew install unikraft/cli/kraftkit

Windows

For Winows, use Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2). First ensure that you have WSL2 set up on your host.

We recommend using the Linux distributions Ubuntu or Debian:·

wsl --install -d debian

Once complete, restart WSL either by shutting down Windows or by closing all of your WSL terminal windows, and issue this command in , CMD, or Windows Run menu (Windows+R):

wsl.exe --shutdown

Install kraft:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://get.kraftkit.sh | sh

Once you have installed kraft, set the UKC (Unikraft Platform) access token you received during your on-boarding:

export UKC_TOKEN=token
export UKC_METRO=fra0 # set globally, or set via the cmd line as below

To take it out for a spin, run:

kraft cloud --metro fra0 deploy -p 443:8080 nginx:latest

This will create an NGINX web server instance in the fra0 metro, mapping port 443 (HTTPS) to port 8080 (NGINX’s default port). You should see output such as

[●] Deployed successfully!
 │
 ├────────── name: nginx-6cfc4
 ├────────── uuid: 62d1d6e9-0d45-4ced-ad2a-619718ba0344
 ├───────── state: running
 ├─────────── url: https://long-violet-92ka3gk7.fra0.kraft.host
 ├───────── image: nginx@sha256:fb3e5fb1609ab4fd40d38ae12605d56fc0dc48aaa0ad4890ed7ba0b637af69f6
 ├───── boot time: 16.65 ms
 ├──────── memory: 128 MiB
 ├─====== service: long-violet-92ka3gk7
 ├── private fqdn: nginx-6cfc4.internal
 ├──── private ip: 172.16.6.4
 └────────── args: /usr/bin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

You can then test your app with your browser or via curl:

curl https://long-violet-92ka3gk7.fra0.kraft.host

Finally, you can kill your instance with:

kraft cloud instance rm nginx-6cfc4

For autoscale, please refer to the autoscale guide.

Note

You always need to specify which metro (a region) you’d like to deploy your app to. You can set this globally by setting the UKC_METRO environment variable as done above, or by using the --metro flag.

Tip

If you want to retrieve full information about an instance, you can do so with the kraft cloud instance get [NAME] -o list command.

Tip

If you need to pass environmental variables to your app you can do so via the ENV instruction in the Dockerfile, or via kraft cloud deploy’s -e flag (e.g., -e VARNAME1=VARVALUE1 -e VARNAME2=VARVALUE2)

A Few Unikraft Cloud Concepts and Features

Just to make your initial Unikraft Cloud experience as smooth as possible it is important to note a few things about the platform.

• All apps are scaled to zero by default. Heavyweight apps can also be started quickly.
• We use the term instance to mean a running app (essentially a virtual machine).
• We use the term service as an abstraction to provide Internet connectivity to apps.
• Additionally, services are also used to load balance traffic across instances of the same app type.
• All your instances have a private IP and DNS name and can talk to each other via these; here’s a guide to show you how to plug two apps together; alternatively, you can use the compose command.
• When launching an app you can set its restart policy to never/always/on-failure, see CLI ref and API ref.
• Images are pushed to a registry from where they’re pulled for running (more on this topic here).
• We also support volumes, custom domains and rolling updates.
• It’s possible to tunnel to private ports and instances using the tunnel command.

Also, it’s worth being aware of the FAQs, where we document common issues users run into.

Next Steps

To help you kick-start your project we’ve put together a set of guides that will allow you to quickly deploy your favorite app. Also in that section you will find another set of guides showing how to use some of the platform’s features, including scale to 0 (on by default, but you can disable it), and autoscale.

If you’re interested in digging into even more details about how the platform works, you can further read the API documentation. Finally, see the CLI Reference for a full description of all kraft cloud commands.

Tip

Most kraft commands have abbreviations and aliases to make input more concise; please check them out here.

Finally, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. Happy Krafting! ⚒️🚀