Installation

Prerequisites

• Docker 25 or newer, with the daemon reachable by the user running arcave. See Requirements.
• Nothing else from Docker: arcave talks to the daemon and drives compose as libraries, so it needs neither the docker CLI nor the Compose plugin.
• For the cdc backend only: the ability to pull and run restic/restic containers, and a daemon that can reach a loopback port on your host.

arcave needs no compose file of its own and no changes to your project. It reads the running project from the daemon.

Via install script

Latest release into /usr/local/bin

curl -fsSL https://greenmask.io/arcave/install.sh | bash

A specific release, or a different directory

curl -fsSL https://greenmask.io/arcave/install.sh | bash -s -- v1.2.3
curl -fsSL https://greenmask.io/arcave/install.sh | bash -s -- --version v1.2.3
curl -fsSL https://greenmask.io/arcave/install.sh | bash -s -- --dir ~/.local/bin

The script resolves the release, downloads the binary for your platform, verifies it against the release's checksum.txt, and installs it. It escalates with sudo only if the target directory is not writable.

Environment variable	Effect
ARCAVE_VERSION	Release tag to install, instead of the latest; -v/--version overrides it.
ARCAVE_INSTALL_DIR	Default install directory, instead of /usr/local/bin; -d/--dir overrides it.
ARCAVE_BASE_URL	Base URL of the release host. Default https://github.com.

Via a pre-built binary

Releases publish one bare executable per platform — there is no archive to unpack.

Download and install manually

VERSION=1.2.3
PLATFORM=darwin_arm64          # or linux_amd64, linux_arm64, ...
curl -fsSLo arcave \
  "https://github.com/GreenmaskIO/arcave/releases/download/v${VERSION}/arcave_${VERSION}_${PLATFORM}"
chmod +x arcave
sudo install -m 0755 arcave /usr/local/bin/arcave

Published targets:

Supported platforms

darwin_amd64     linux_amd64      linux_armv6      linux_ppc64le
darwin_arm64     linux_arm64      linux_armv7      linux_riscv64
                                                   linux_s390x

Checksums for the whole release live in a single checksum.txt beside the binaries.

From source

Requires Go and a checkout of the repository.

Build the binary

git clone https://github.com/GreenmaskIO/arcave.git
cd arcave
make build          # produces ./bin/arcave

Run the test suite

make test-unit      # unit tests, no Docker needed
make test           # unit tests, then the integration tests against a live Docker daemon
make lint           # golangci-lint

note

make build stamps the version (from git describe), the commit and the build date into the binary. A plain go build or go run reports dev.

Verify the installation

arcave --version

Next steps

• Getting started — initialise a project and take your first savepoint.
• Commands — the full command reference.