Try it on one machine

This is the development stack: the control plane, the proxy and the stores in containers, and a real runner on the same host, booting real virtual machines. It is what Spinbox’s own e2e lane brings up, and every command below is one that lane runs. It is not an installation: nothing in it is backed up, its credentials are public test fixtures, and it answers only on localhost. To install Spinbox, see Install on AWS.

What the machine needs

• Linux on x86_64, with /dev/kvm, /dev/vhost-vsock and /dev/net/tun usable by you
• sudo without a password: the runner and its machines run as root
• Docker, with the compose and buildx plugins
• Go (the version in go.mod), Task, pnpm and mkcert
• 30 GB free on the disk the checkout is on

1. Check the machine

git clone https://github.com/spin-stack/spin
cd spin
task doctor

task doctor says what the machine has and fails on the first thing the stack cannot do without. task e2e:up runs it before building anything.

2. Bring the stack up

task e2e:setup
task e2e:up

The first run downloads the pinned machine - QEMU, the guest kernel and its base image - and builds the control plane, the dashboard and the runner; expect several minutes. When it ends, the dashboard is at https://app.localhost:10443. If the host has more than one default route, name the one the machines go out through: E2E_VM_NETWORK_UPLINK=<interface> task e2e:up.

3. Create a workspace and run a command in it

The stack signs in its test user, with an SSH key of their own, in _output/run/e2e/people/user. Run the CLI as that user:

root=$PWD user=$PWD/_output/run/e2e/people/user
spin() { HOME="$user" SSL_CERT_DIR="/etc/ssl/certs:$user/.trust" "$root/bin/spin" "$@"; }
spin workspace create --name demo --wait --timeout 3m
spin exec demo --no-tty -- uname -a

The workspace is a virtual machine of its own on this host. From here the Quickstart applies, with demo on this stack.

4. Take it down

task e2e:down

This stops the runner and its machines and removes the containers with their volumes: the database and the object store go with them, and the next task e2e:up starts empty.