Installing From the Terminal¶

This page used to describe installing a .deb-based edition of Eight.ly (Standard/Container) over SSH with dpkg -i. That install method doesn't exist anymore.

What replaced it¶

There is now one product, Eight.ly OS, installed by booting the installer image on bare metal or in a VM. There is no .deb install path and no "install on top of an existing Debian/Ubuntu host" option. (A .deb still exists internally — it's the payload the built-in updater downloads and swaps in place — but it was never a standalone install method and still isn't.)

For a headless box with no monitor — the situation this page originally covered — the current path is netboot or remote virtual media (iDRAC/IPMI/JetKVM), both driven entirely over the network with no local screen required. See Installing Eight.ly OS for both options, including SSH access setup during the on-screen installer so you can manage the box from a terminal afterward.

Managing an installed box from a terminal¶

Once Eight.ly OS is installed and running, day-to-day terminal management — checking status, listing containers or VMs, managing storage, scripting anything the dashboard does — goes through the API, either directly with curl (see API Reference) or through eosctl, a command line client generated from the same API. Eight.ly OS also ships a built-in web terminal in the dashboard for ad hoc shell access to the box itself — see Web Terminal.