Kheeper

Boot on Bare Metal

This guide walks through booting your first Kheeper-managed host on bare metal using iPXE. We'll use latitude.sh for on-demand bare metal servers with hourly billing, which means this tutorial can be completed for less than $1.

Prerequisites

Set the vars in your shell you'll need for the remaining steps:

ORG=$(kheeper orgs list | grep 'user-[0-9a-f]' | awk '{ print $1 }')

Step 1 — Create an iPXE script

Generate a one-time iPXE script for your org. The script is valid for 24 hours.

kheeper hosts ipxe create ${ORG}/my-server

This prints a multi-line iPXE script that starts with #!ipxe and ends with boot. Copy this script — you'll use it in the next step.

Step 2 — Create a server on latitude.sh

  1. Sign up or log in at latitude.sh
  2. Click Create Server
  3. Pick the cheapest available server in your desired location
  4. Under Operating System, select Custom iPXE and paste the script from step 1
  5. Under Billing, select Hourly
  6. Click Deploy

latitude.sh server configuration

Step 3 — Wait and Verify

The server will take ten to thirty minutes to boot. Then you can check that the host has joined your organization:

kheeper hosts list --org ${ORG}

You should see my-server in the list.

Step 4 — Author the config

Generate a starter config from the image's schema and edit it to fit your host. If you used the example Caddy image from the build-and-push guide, it expects domain and name fields:

kheeper releases start config.json --image us.kheeper.com/${ORG}/getting-started:v1

Set domain to my-server.${ORG}.us.kheeper.app — every Kheeper host gets a <host>.<org>.us.kheeper.app DNS record (region-scoped) that points at its public IP, so Caddy can request a TLS cert for it automatically.

Step 5 — Create a release

Create a release that pairs the image with your config:

kheeper releases create ${ORG}/my-server:v1 \
  --image us.kheeper.com/${ORG}/getting-started:v1 \
  --config-file config.json

Step 6 — Activate the release

kheeper hosts activate ${ORG}/my-server:v1

The host will pick up the release within a minute, then pull and reboot.

Step 7 — Verify

Once the host has rebooted, curl the domain you set in the config:

curl https://my-server.${ORG}.us.kheeper.app/
Next: Authentication