Installation

Note

kinder is a fork of kind with opinionated addons pre-installed. If you are familiar with kind, most concepts transfer directly.

Prerequisites

• Docker, Podman, or nerdctl — kinder uses a container runtime to create cluster nodes
• kubectl — Install kubectl

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install patrykquantumnomad/kinder/kinder

This installs a pre-built binary for your architecture (Apple Silicon or Intel). No Go toolchain required.

Download Pre-built Binary

Pre-built binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows are available from GitHub Releases.

Download the archive for your platform, extract, and move to your PATH:

macOS / Linux

# Replace the URL with the archive for your platform from the latest release
tar xzf kinder_*_darwin_arm64.tar.gz
chmod +x kinder
sudo mv kinder /usr/local/bin/

Windows

Download the .zip archive from GitHub Releases and extract kinder.exe to a directory in your PATH.

Build from Source

If you prefer to build from source, you will also need Go 1.24+ (Install Go).

git clone https://github.com/PatrykQuantumNomad/kinder.git
cd kinder
make install

This compiles the kinder binary and places it in your $GOPATH/bin (or $GOBIN if set).

If the command is not found after building, make sure $(go env GOPATH)/bin is included in your PATH:

export PATH="$(go env GOPATH)/bin:$PATH"

Verify Installation

kinder version

You should see output like:

kind v1.2.0 go1.25.7 darwin/arm64