Getting Started
Welcome to the Zarf documentation! This section will list the various ways to install Zarf onto your machine. It will also demonstrate how to verify the installation. Choose the installation type that best suits your needs in accordance with your operating system. Let's get started!
Installing Zarf
There are multiple ways to get the Zarf CLI onto your machine:
- Install from Homebrew.
- Download a prebuilt binary.
- Build the CLI from scratch.
Installing from the Defense Unicorns Homebrew Tap
Homebrew is an open-source software package manager that simplifies the installation of software on macOS and Linux. With Homebrew, installing Zarf is simple:
brew tap defenseunicorns/tap
brew install zarf
The above command detects your OS and system architecture and installs the correct Zarf CLI binary for your machine. Once the above command is entered, the CLI should be installed on your $PATH and is ready for immediate use.
Downloading a Prebuilt Binary from our GitHub Releases
All Zarf releases on GitHub include prebuilt binaries that you can download and use. We offer a small range of combinations of OS and architecture for you to choose from.
On most Linux distributions, you can install the binary onto your $PATH by simply moving the downloaded binary to the /usr/local/bin directory:
chmod +x ./path/to/downloaded/{ZARF_FILE}
mv ./path/to/downloaded/{ZARF_FILE} /usr/local/bin/zarf
On Windows or macOS, you can install the binary onto your $PATH by moving the downloaded binary to the desired directory and modifying the $PATH environment variable to include that directory.
Building the CLI from Scratch
If you want to build the CLI from scratch, you can do that too. Our local builds depend on Go 1.19.x and Node 18.x and are built using make.
The make build-cli command builds a binary for each combination of OS and architecture. If you want to shorten the build time, you can use an alternative command to only build the binary you need:
make build-cli-mac-intelmake build-cli-mac-applemake build-cli-linux-amdmake build-cli-linux-armmake build-cli-windows-amdmake build-cli-windows-arm
For additional information, see the Building Your Own Zarf CLI page.
Verifying the Zarf Install
Now that you have installed Zarf, let's verify that it is working. First, we'll check the version of Zarf that has been installed:
$ zarf version
vX.X.X # X.X.X is replaced with the version number of your specific installation
If you are not seeing this then Zarf was not installed onto your $PATH correctly. This $PATH guide should help with that.
Downloading the 'Init' Package
The 'init' package is a special Zarf package that initializes a cluster with services that are used to store resources while in the air gap and is required for most (but not all) Zarf deployments.
You can get it for your version of Zarf by visiting the Zarf releases page and downloading it into your working directory or into ~/.zarf-cache/zarf-init-<amd64|arm64>-vX.X.X.tar.zst)
If you are online on the machine with cluster access you can also run zarf init without the --confirm flag to be given the option to download the version of the init package for your Zarf version.
You can build your own custom 'init' package too if you'd like. For this you should check out the Creating a Custom 'init' Package Tutorial.
Where to Next?
Depending on how familiar you are with Kubernetes, DevOps, and Zarf, let's find what set of information would be most useful to you.
If you want to become more familiar with Zarf and it's features, see the Tutorials page.
More information about the Zarf CLI is available on the Zarf CLI page, or by browsing through the help descriptions of all the commands available through
zarf --help.More information about the packages that Zarf creates and deploys is available in the Understanding Zarf Packages page.
If you want to take a step back and better understand the problem Zarf is trying to solve, you can find more context on the Understand the Basics and Core Concepts pages.