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.

📄️ Bring Your Own Image

Build and publish your own Kairos images while keeping full control of release cadence.

📄️ 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 supports multiple Linux distributions and this remains a core feature.

📄️ 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.