Quickstart

One command per stage of the lifecycle. Each of these is a real, working invocation.

Build

charly box build fedora

A box is a container image composed from a candy list. charly box build resolves the candy graph, generates a multi-stage Containerfile, and builds it.

# a box living in a submodule — charly resolves cross-repo refs
charly -C box/cachyos box build cachyos

Run

charly shell fedora     # drop into an interactive shell
charly start jupyter    # run it as a managed pod
charly config jupyter   # configure as a systemd service (quadlet + secrets + volumes)

Deploy

The same candies apply to substrates other than containers — a host, a VM, a Kubernetes cluster, an Android device:

charly bundle add host ripgrep
charly bundle add host fedora-coder --with-services --yes
charly bundle del host      # reverses everything, via recorded ReverseOps and an install ledger

charly bundle del is not a best-effort cleanup: every applied step records how to undo itself, so teardown replays the ledger backwards.

Evaluate

charly check run check-pod

A check bed is a disposable deployment that exists to be destroyed. charly check run drives the whole sequence — build, deploy, bring to steady state, run the baked acceptance plan, tear down — and reports a verdict.

This is the stage most tools do not have, and it is why every candy on this site shows an acceptance plan: the spec is the test, baked into the image and runnable against a live deployment.

Building a bootable VM

charly box build <my-bootc-box>              # a candy: with base: + bootc: true
charly vm build  <my-bootc-vm> --type qcow2  # a kind:vm with source.kind: bootc
charly vm create <my-bootc-vm>

Where to go next

• Candies and boxes — what you are actually composing.
• Candyboxing — why the boundary is the security model.
• Recipe cards — the dedicated page for every candy, box and verb.