Kiln, a local cloud for Linux hosts with KVM

VMs, networks and Postgres on a Linux host you own.

Kiln is one daemon and one CLI. You say what should exist. Kiln creates it, watches its health, rolls back what fails and cleans up what you delete.

kilnd: The daemon. It runs on the host, owns every machine, network and appliance, and serves the HTTP API.
kiln: The CLI, built for Linux and macOS on amd64 and arm64. It talks to the daemon on the same host or over HTTPS.
kiln-agent: The agent inside each Linux guest. Exec and shells travel over vsock, so the guest needs no SSH server.
HTTP API: Everything the CLI does goes through it, behind a bearer token. It listens on loopback until you turn on HTTPS.

kiln vm create dev A persistent VM called dev

--profile ubuntu-docker Ubuntu with Docker and build tools

--disk 64G Its own 64 GB disk

--memory-mb 8192 8 GB of memory

--cpu 4 CPU time worth four cores

kiln vm open dev
Opens a terminal in the guest.
kiln vm forward dev 3000
Tunnels a local port to port 3000 in the guest.
kiln vm stop dev
Stops it. The disk survives stop, start and restarts of the daemon.

Power

Idle machines stop, and the next request wakes them.
kiln vm power app --mode warm --idle 15m
Networking

Private networks between machines, with proxy routes, port forwards and tunnels to reach them.
kiln networks create --name app-net --cidr 10.44.0.0/24
Postgres

A managed Postgres you clone for each test run and reset between tests.
kiln appliance postgres clone db runtime-1 --source fixture-v1
Deployments

Declare what should exist, and Kiln plans the difference.
kiln deployment outputs app --generation 4
Host

What the host needs, and the checks to run before you create anything.
kiln host doctor

It is in private development, and there is nothing to download today.

The host page lists what Kiln needs to run and the checks it makes first.

Kiln Console, the iOS companion app, is at its first milestone. It is a read-only dashboard running on sample data.