Installation¶

One-liner (recommended)¶

curl -sSL https://get.sistemo.io | sh

This installs the binary to /usr/local/bin (or set SISTEMO_INSTALL_DIR), then runs sistemo install to download Firecracker and the guest kernel to ~/.sistemo/.

From GitHub releases¶

# Download the binary
curl -sSLO https://github.com/davidestf/sistemo/releases/latest/download/sistemo-linux-amd64
chmod +x sistemo-linux-amd64
sudo mv sistemo-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/sistemo

# Run setup
sistemo install

From source¶

git clone https://github.com/davidestf/sistemo.git
cd sistemo
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o sistemo ./cmd/sistemo
sudo mv sistemo /usr/local/bin/
sistemo install

Requires Go 1.22+. CGO_ENABLED=0 produces a static binary that works on any Linux distribution.

What sistemo install does¶

1. Creates ~/.sistemo/ directory structure
2. Downloads Firecracker v1.14.2 from GitHub releases
3. Downloads a guest kernel from get.sistemo.io
4. Generates an ed25519 SSH key pair at ~/.sistemo/ssh/sistemo_key
5. Checks /dev/kvm access

Upgrade¶

Update the binary (re-run the one-liner, download a new release, or rebuild from source), then:

sistemo install --upgrade

This re-downloads Firecracker and the kernel even if they already exist.

Requirements¶

Most bare metal servers, VPS with nested virtualization, and Raspberry Pi 5 work.

Verify¶

sudo sistemo up    # Start the daemon
curl -s http://localhost:7777/health   # Should return 200

Uninstall¶

# 1. Stop all machines and the daemon
sistemo machine list
sistemo machine delete <name>           # for each machine

# 2. Remove systemd service (if installed)
sudo sistemo service uninstall

# 3. Remove data and binary
sudo rm -rf ~/.sistemo
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/sistemo

Sistemo is a single binary + one data directory (~/.sistemo/). If you installed the systemd service with sistemo service install, make sure to uninstall it first.