Getting Started with Arctic

Arctic creates encrypted tunnels between Linux hosts, enabling transparent routing of traffic between sites. An agent runs on each host to manage networking, and the CLI tool orchestrates cluster configuration from your workstation.

This guide uses the compose approach - the recommended way to manage Arctic clusters. You define your cluster configuration in a YAML file and apply it with a single command.

What You Will Learn

By following these tutorials, you will:

1. Prepare your Linux hosts with the required packages
2. Install the Arctic agent and CLI
3. Define your cluster configuration in a YAML file
4. Apply the configuration to create a working cluster

Tutorials

Alternative Approach

For advanced use cases or incremental changes, Arctic also supports imperative CLI commands where you manage resources individually with commands like arctic peers add and arctic services create. The compose approach is recommended for most deployments as it provides a declarative, version-controllable configuration.