This repository is Experimental meaning that it's based on untested ideas or techniques and not yet established or finalized or involves a radically new and innovative style! This means that support is best effort (at best!) and we strongly encourage you to NOT use this in production.

Tinkerbell is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text. Some of the projects used by the Tinkerbell project may be governed by a different license, please refer to its specific license.

Tinkerbell is part of the CNCF Projects.

The Tinkerbell community meets bi-weekly on Tuesday. The meeting details can be found here.

Community Resources:

• Community Slack
• CNCF #tinkerbell
• YouTube Channel (demos, meeting recordings, virtual meetups)

The Tinkerbell stack consists of several microservices, and a gRPC API:

Tink is the short-hand name for the tink-server, tink-worker, and tink-cli. tink-worker and tink-server communicate over gRPC, and are responsible for processing workflows. The CLI is the user-interactive piece for creating workflows and their building blocks, templates and hardware data.

Boots is Tinkerbell's DHCP server. It handles DHCP requests, hands out IPs, and serves up iPXE. It uses the Tinkerbell client to pull and push hardware data. It only responds to a predefined set of MAC addresses so it can be deployed in an existing network without interfering with existing DHCP infrastructure.

Hegel is the metadata service used by Tinkerbell and OSIE. It collects data from both and transforms it into a JSON format to be consumed as metadata.

OSIE is Tinkerbell's default an in-memory installation environment for bare metal. It installs operating systems and handles deprovisioning.

Hook is the newly introduced alternative to OSIE. It's the next iteration of the in-memory installation environment to handle operating system installation and deprovisioning.

PBnJ is an optional microservice that can communicate with baseboard management controllers (BMCs) to control power and boot settings.

Use make help. The most interesting targets are make all (or just make) and make images. make all builds all the binaries for your host OS and CPU to enable running directly. make images will build all the binaries for Linux/x86_64 and build docker images with them.

For complete documentation, please visit the Tinkerbell project hosted at tinkerbell.org.