Corral v0.1: a portable Proxmox for people who already have a cluster (or just a laptop)

I love Proxmox. I've run it for years. But Proxmox is a distribution — it owns the whole machine, it's welded to Debian, and if your infrastructure has moved on to Kubernetes it's a second world you have to maintain next to the first.

Corral is my answer to a question that kept nagging me: what if the Proxmox experience — the datacenter tree, the create wizard, one-click consoles, VMs and containers side by side — was just a single static binary you point at whatever you already have?

The short version:

• Got a Kubernetes cluster? Corral drives KubeVirt through kubectl and virtctl — no operator to install, no agent, no CRDs of its own.
• Just a laptop? The same commands run VMs on local QEMU/KVM under systemd, and as of this week the same dashboard shows them under a "local" node.
• Got Tailscale? Every VM lands on your tailnet automatically — SSH from your phone, VNC from the couch.

One binary. create / start / ssh / viewer / clone / delete work identically on both backends, and Corral remembers which VM lives where. There's a TUI for quick jobs, a Proxmox-style web dashboard for everything else, and a Proxmox API compatibility layer if your Terraform provider expects one.

And to be clear about what "one binary" means: the CLI, the TUI, and the web UI are all in it. brew install hanthor/tap/corral and you have the whole product — there's no separate web package or frontend build to deploy.

Try it in 30 seconds, literally no cluster

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tuna-os/corral/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
corral --demo        # the TUI
corral web --demo    # the dashboard, on Proxmox's port naturally (8006)

--demo boots an in-memory fake cluster inside the binary: three nodes, eight VMs in every state you'd meet in real life (running, stopped, paused, mid-install, a paused Windows desktop, an ephemeral scratch VM with a TTL counting down), two containers, live CPU metrics. It's not a mockup — the real CLI, TUI, and web UI run their actual code paths against it, and the state is live: stop a VM in the dashboard and watch the TUI agree.

I built it so I could polish the interfaces without burning a cluster, and it turned out to be the best onboarding tool Corral has. It's also how CI drives the frontend now — a headless browser clicks through the real dashboard against --demo on every change.

The part I care most about: your OS is a container image

This is the TunaOS connection. Point Corral at a bootable container image:

corral create dev --bootc ghcr.io/tuna-os/yellowfin:gnome --wait-ssh

It runs bootc install to-disk in a builder VM on the cluster, then boots the result as a first-class VM. Your OS lives in a registry; corral bootc upgrade moves the VM to the next build. Every TunaOS image — and every Universal Blue image, and anything else bootc-bootable — becomes a VM you can summon with one command. Proxmox structurally can't do that.

Containers get the Proxmox treatment too

corral ct create makes a "pet pod" — a plain Kubernetes pod with a persistent volume and an init process, presented like a Proxmox CT. In privileged mode it seeds a full root filesystem onto the volume, distrobox-style, so apt install survives a restart. There's even corral ct create myproj --devcontainer ./myproj if your project already has a devcontainer.json.

Honest state of things

v0.1.x, five weeks old. The KubeVirt backend is the most exercised path; local QEMU in the web UI landed this week (lifecycle + info; consoles still route through the CLI). Windows VMs, GPU passthrough, and scheduled snapshots/backups exist as plugins of varying maturity.

If you run VMs on Kubernetes and miss the way Proxmox feels, or you run Proxmox and wish it were one binary instead of an operating system: give corral --demo thirty seconds. That's the pitch.

Corral is Apache-2.0 at github.com/tuna-os/corral — stars very welcome, they're the gate to homebrew-core.