isle/docs/user/getting-started.md

Getting Started

This document will guide you through the process of obtaining an isle binary and joining a network.

NOTE currently only linux machines with the following architectures are supported:

• x86_64 / amd64
• aarch64 / arm64
• armv7l (Raspberry Pi)
• i686

(Only x86_64 has been tested.)

More OSs and architectures coming soon!

Obtaining an isle Binary

Every host can have a binary built for it which has all configuration for that host embedded directly into it. Such binaries require no extra configuration by the user to use, and have no dependencies on anything else in the user's system.

The process of obtaining a custom binary for your host is quite simple: ask an admin of your network to give you one!

Note that if you'd like to join the network on multiple devices, each device will needs its own binary, so be sure to tell your admin how many you want to add and their names.

Obtaining an isle Binary, the Hard Way

Alternatively, you can build your own binary by running the following from the project's root:

nix-build -A appImage

(NOTE Dependencies of isle seemingly compile all of musl and rust from scratch (it's not clear why, blame garage!). If you have not otherwise configured it, nix might be using a tmpfs as its build directory, and the capacity of this tmpfs will probably be exceeded by this build. You can change your build directory to somewhere on-disk by setting the TMPDIR environment variable for nix-daemon (see this github issue.))

The resulting binary can be found in the result directory which is created.

In this case you will need an admin to provide you with a bootstrap.yml for your host, rather than a custom binary. When running the daemon in the following steps you will need to provide the --bootstrap-path CLI argument to the daemon process.

Running the Daemon

Once you have a binary, you will need to run the daemon sub-command as the root user. This can most easily be done using the sudo command, in a terminal:

sudo /path/to/isle daemon

This will start the daemon process, which will keep running until you kill it with ctrl-c.

You can double check that the daemon is running properly by pinging a private IP from the network in a separate terminal:

ping 10.10.0.1

If the pings are successful then your daemon is working!

Installing the Daemon as a Systemd Service

NOTE in the future we will introduce an install sub-command which will automate most of this section.

Rather than running the daemon manually, you can install it as a systemd service. This way your daemon will automatically start in the background on startup, and will be restarted if it has any issues.

To do so, create a file at /etc/systemd/system/isle.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=isle
Requires=network.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Restart=always
RestartSec=1s
User=root
ExecStart=/path/to/isle daemon

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Remember to change the /path/to/isle part to the actual absolute path to your binary!

Once created, perform the following commands in a terminal to enable the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now isle

You can check the service's status by doing:

sudo systemctl status isle

and you can view its full logs by doing:

sudo journalctl -lu isle