Reference

📄️ Architecture

Explore the internal design of Kairos and how its modular, container-based approach supports secure, reproducible infrastructure.

📄️ Artifact Naming Convention

Detailed information about how we name our artifacts including repositories.

📄️ AuroraBoot

Reference documentation for AuroraBoot, a tool for generating bootable images

Welcome to the Kairos configuration reference page. This page provides details on the fields available in the YAML file used for installing Kairos, a Linux distribution focused on running Kubernetes. This file, written in cloud-config format, allows you to enable Kairos features, configure k3s, and set various other options.

📄️ kairosctl

Learn how to use kairosctl to register nodes, generate tokens, and manage VPN connections securely and efficiently.

📄️ Stage modules

Explore built-in modules for DNS, users, files, and services that help you customize Kairos via cloud-init during boot stages.

📄️ The Kairos Factory

Converting any base image into a Kairos ready image

📄️ Reset

Discover how to reset a Kairos node using boot options, Kubernetes integration, or recovery tools while preserving config data.

📄️ Build Kairos from scratch

This article shows how to bring your own image with Kairos, and build a Kairos derivative from scratch using base container images from popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc.

📄️ Build Raw images with QEMU

This article shows how to bring your own image with Kairos, and build a Kairos derivative from scratch using base container images from popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc.

📄️ Image support matrix

Kairos offers several pre-built images for user convenience based on popular Linux distributions such as openSUSE, Alpine Linux, and Ubuntu. The Kairos core team does its best to test these images, but those that are based on systemd (e.g. openSUSE, Ubuntu) are more thoroughly tested due to their homogenous settings. Support for other non-systemd based flavors (e.g. Alpine) may be limited due to team bandwidth. However, as Kairos is an open source community-driven project, we welcome any contributions, bug reports, and bug fixes. Check out our Contribution guidelines for more information.

📄️ Troubleshooting

Things can go wrong. This section tries to give guidelines in helping out identify potential issues.

📄️ Recovery mode

The Kairos recovery mode can be used to recover a damaged system or to regain access remotely (with assistance) to a machine which has been lost access to. The recovery mode is accessible only from the GRUB menu, from both the LiveCD, and an installed system.