Install

Install charly once, then use it from anywhere. The rest of this site is written for a machine with charly installed and no charly checkout anywhere: --repo <owner>/<repo> reads a published project straight from git, and charly box new project <dir> starts one of your own. Nothing on any other page asks you to clone a repository.

charly runs on Linux, amd64 and arm64. The native packages pull in their runtime dependencies — podman for containers, qemu/libvirt for VMs, gocryptfs for encrypted volumes.

Install from the package repositories

Every package is signed. On arm64, replace amd64 with arm64 in the repository URLs.

Fedora

Create /etc/yum.repos.d/charly.repo:

[charly]
name=charly
baseurl=https://opencharly.github.io/charly-fedora/amd64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://opencharly.github.io/charly-fedora/RPM-GPG-KEY-charly

sudo dnf install charly

Debian and Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, use charly-ubuntu in place of charly-debian:

curl -fsSL https://opencharly.github.io/charly-debian/charly.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/charly.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/charly.gpg] https://opencharly.github.io/charly-debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/charly.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install charly

Arch Linux and CachyOS

curl -fsSL -o /tmp/charly.gpg https://opencharly.github.io/charly-arch/charly.gpg
sudo pacman-key --add /tmp/charly.gpg
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key 978DFF11A951A830F7ADA2D4062B073E9D1BAE2E

Append to /etc/pacman.conf, then install:

[charly]
Server = https://opencharly.github.io/charly-arch/amd64
SigLevel = Required

sudo pacman -Sy charly

Alpine

sudo wget -O /etc/apk/keys/charly.rsa.pub https://opencharly.github.io/charly-alpine/charly.rsa.pub
echo "https://opencharly.github.io/charly-alpine/amd64" | sudo tee -a /etc/apk/repositories
sudo apk update
sudo apk add charly

Variants

Each repository carries three packages:

Package	What it bakes in
`charly`	the everyday set: secrets, feature, vm, doctor, clean, settings, candy, mcp, review, pipeline
`charly-full`	the everyday set plus GPU udev rules and the preemption arbiter
`charly-minimal`	doctor, clean, settings

There is also an OpenWrt feed — the binary installs and runs there, but OpenWrt carries no podman or libvirt — and a build for the JetKVM appliance.

Check the install

charly version   # the CalVer the binary was stamped with
charly doctor    # what is installed, what is missing, which GPU charly sees

Install with mise

mise is a polyglot dev-tool version manager (asdf-compatible, Rust). It installs the published release binary straight from GitHub Releases — no Go toolchain, no source build:

mise use github:opencharly/charly                    # latest release
mise use github:opencharly/[email protected]      # pin a CalVer

mise use writes the tool into your project’s mise.toml and installs it. The charly shim lands on your $PATH; without activation, mise x runs it:

charly version            # via the mise shim
mise x -- charly version  # without the shim on PATH

The binary is the same CalVer-stamped release build the package repos ship — charly version tells you which one. A release binary brings no runtime dependencies with it; charly doctor reports what is missing.

Developing charly

All development on charly itself happens in the umbrella repository, opencharly/opencharly — one clone of the whole org, with charly, the plugins, the distros and this site pinned as submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/opencharly/opencharly.git
cd opencharly
./charly/scripts/bootstrap-charly.sh   # builds ./charly/bin/charly (CalVer-stamped) — never installs it

Never edit a submodule in place. Each session works in its own git worktree under .worktrees/<slug>/<repo>/, branched off origin/main, builds its own binary there, and lands every change by pull request. The umbrella’s AGENTS.md has the full development model.

To start your own project, create a charly.yml and a candy/ directory in any directory. Projects predating the current schema convert in one shot with charly migrate, a single idempotent pass to the latest CalVer schema.

Build your first box →