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feat(cli): forkd quickstart — zero-to-first-fork in one command#240

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WaylandYang merged 2 commits into
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feat/quickstart
Jun 11, 2026
Merged

feat(cli): forkd quickstart — zero-to-first-fork in one command#240
WaylandYang merged 2 commits into
mainfrom
feat/quickstart

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Why

Conversion-funnel work. Stars are growing ~10× faster than downloads; the most plausible culprit is first-run friction — today a new user crosses four manual steps over two scripts and three verbs before seeing their first fork. Every step is a place to bounce.

What

sudo -E forkd quickstart collapses the whole path into one command:

  1. Preflight (new doctor::preflight()) — hard-gates on platform / hardware virt / KVM / firecracker binary; reports kernel / tap / Docker as routing data instead of failures.
  2. Heal with consent — missing guest kernel, tap device, or netns get listed in a single prompt (--yes for CI). The repo's idempotent setup scripts are embedded via include_str!, so a tarball install works without a repo checkout. Nothing touches the host without an explicit yes — lesson learned from a recent incident where unprompted host networking changes caused real damage.
  3. Snapshot — reuse existing quickstart tag > bake from python:3.12-slim via local Docker > hub pull fallback. Local bake is preferred because it uses this host's Firecracker — immune to the cross-FC-version bitcode error restore failures that hub-distributed snapshots can hit (the exact failure mode from the bench: N=100 hugepage spawn numbers (deferred from #230) #234 yak-shave).
  4. Fork-n 10 --per-child-netns, per-child timings, then next-step pointers (wider fan-out, exec, recipes).

Idempotent: re-run reuses the snapshot and skips completed setup.

Also: README gets a "One command" section at the top of Quick start, and the stale v0.3.4 tarball URLs are bumped to v0.5.2.

Verification

  • cargo check / cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings / cargo fmt --check: clean on the dev box
  • forkd quickstart --help renders correctly
  • E2E on a live host: pending — needs a box where I'm allowed to touch networking; will run before tagging the next release and paste the transcript here

Test plan

  • CI green
  • E2E transcript on a clean host (tap + netns creation consent flow, Docker bake route, hub fallback route)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

WaylandYang and others added 2 commits June 11, 2026 09:49
publish-pypi.yml was failing with HTTP 400 'File already exists' when a
v* tag got force-pushed (e.g. when fixing release.yml's Docker job for
v0.5.2 — see #235). The publish step has nothing to do, but the action
defaults to skip-existing=false, so the no-op surfaces as a failure.

Set skip-existing=true: PyPI immutability means re-publish is a logical
no-op anyway, and treating it as a hard error means every tag-fix dance
leaves a red X behind that's actually a non-event.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Conversion-funnel work: stars are growing ~10x faster than downloads,
and the most-cited reason is first-run friction (host setup, kernel
download, snapshot bake, netns provisioning — four manual steps across
two scripts and three verbs before the first fork).

`sudo -E forkd quickstart` collapses that to one command:

1. doctor::preflight() — hard-gates on platform/KVM/firecracker;
   reports kernel/tap/docker as data rather than failures
2. Heals what's missing WITH CONSENT (or --yes): guest kernel
   download, tap creation, netns provisioning. The setup scripts are
   embedded via include_str! so a tarball install works without the
   repo checked out; an interactive prompt lists exactly what will be
   touched before anything runs. Nothing on the host changes without
   an explicit yes.
3. Snapshot: reuse existing > bake from python:3.12-slim via local
   Docker (preferred — uses *this host's* Firecracker, so the vmstate
   can never hit cross-FC-version restore errors) > hub pull fallback
   with a compat warning.
4. fork -n 10 --per-child-netns, then prints next steps.

Idempotent: re-running skips completed setup and reuses the snapshot.

README: new "One command" section at the top of Quick start; stale
v0.3.4 tarball URLs bumped to v0.5.2.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@WaylandYang WaylandYang merged commit b527519 into main Jun 11, 2026
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@WaylandYang WaylandYang deleted the feat/quickstart branch June 11, 2026 04:26
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