Kaeru is an experiment for a homelab server, akin to platforms like ZimaOS/CasaOS, or Umbrel, but it is compiled into a single binary.
Caution
Kaeru is an experimental project! At current stage it can barely do anything, and you should not use for anything other than development!
Kaeru has only a few external dependencies:
- Go >1.26
- Docker >29
- just >1.48
Other deps include, but are not yet included in the build bundle:
- Node.js >25
- PNPM >10
Prefer to use just instead of manual commands with go, since it includes environment variables (see below) and other exported shell vars, so you don't need to keep typing it over and over.
At the moment, Kaeru has 2 environment variables:
KAERU_ENVIRONMENT: "development" or "production"KAERU_JWT_SECRET: a secret for JWT tokens. On development you could just put some gibberish there, but on production you'll likely want to generate a 256-bit token.
just serve
# in another terminal
cd web && pnpm dev