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Installation

Don't wait for the perfect system. Slicer can run practically anywhere.

You'll get a Discord invite at the end of the installation, once you successfully complete the slicer activate command.

System requirements

Any reasonably modern computer can run Slicer, the requirements are very low - x86_64 or Arm64 (including the Raspberry Pi).

Sustainably sourced:

  • Low powered N100 mini PC / Beelink / Minisforum
  • Ampere Altra / Raspberry Pi 5 (with NVMe)
  • Mac Mini M1 / M2 with Asahi Linux installed
  • Self-built ATX tower
  • Computer under your desk / old Thinkpad / Dell server from eBay

Cloud-based bare-metal:

  • Hetzner Robot (cheapest, best value)
  • Phoenix NAP
  • Latitude.sh

Enterprise:

  • On-premises datacenter
  • OpenStack / VMware (with nested virtualisation)
  • Azure, DigitalOcean, GCP VMs (with nested virtualisation)

A Linux system with KVM is required, so if you see /dev/kvm, Slicer will work.

Ubuntu LTS is formally supported, whilst Arch Linux and RHEL-like Operating Systems should work - we won't be able to debug your system.

Ideally, nothing else should be installed on a host that runs Slicer. It should be thought of as a basic appliance - a bare OS, with minimal packages.

Run these steps

Slicer is evolving, and for the better. Today it uses part of the installation process for actuated.

The installer sets up Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, containerd for storage, and a few networking options.

# The installer usually looks for an actuated license, but you don't
# need one to run the installation. We'll create a temporary file via touch.
mkdir -p ~/.actuated
touch ~/.actuated/LICENSE

(
# Install arkade
curl -sLS https://get.arkade.dev | sudo sh

# Use arkade to extract the agent from its OCI container image
arkade oci install ghcr.io/openfaasltd/actuated-agent:latest --path ./agent
chmod +x ./agent/agent*
sudo mv ./agent/agent* /usr/local/bin/
)

(
cd agent
sudo -E ./install.sh
)

Then, get the Slicer binary:

sudo -E arkade oci install ghcr.io/openfaasltd/slicer:latest \
  --path /usr/local/bin

The same command can be repeated to update Slicer to future versions.

Activate Slicer to obtain a license key:

slicer activate --help

slicer activate

Next, start your first VM with the walk through.

Updating slicer

To update Slicer run the arkade command from above, and overwrite the binary:

sudo -E arkade oci install ghcr.io/openfaasltd/slicer:latest \
  --path /usr/local/bin