A terminal dashboard for Cluster API on bare metal.
Watch a rolling upgrade move across Machine → Metal3Machine →
BareMetalHost, and see the workload cluster's reaction to it — nodes cordoning,
pods going unready, events firing — on a single screen. Built to replace the
tmux-of-watch-commands that lives next to a maintenance-window runbook.
The dashboard runs. Core panes — rollout overview, machines joined to hosts, nodes, pod health, events — are in place, profiles load from YAML, and the optional subsystem panes (Ceph, Cilium, MetalLB, OVN, OpenStack) appear when those subsystems are detected.
Releases attach statically linked binaries for Linux and macOS on x86_64 and arm64. No runtime dependencies, and no Go toolchain needed unless you want one.
A tagged release — the one to pin. Grab the tarball for your platform from the
releases page, which prints the
exact curl line for each, then:
tar -xzf sextant_*_linux_amd64.tar.gz sextant
install -m 0755 sextant ~/.local/bin/sextantCurrent main — the edge prerelease is rebuilt on every merge, so this URL
always resolves to the tip of the branch. Substitute linux_arm64, darwin_amd64
or darwin_arm64 as needed:
curl -sSfL https://github.com/runlevel-six/sextant/releases/download/edge/sextant_edge_linux_amd64.tar.gz \
| tar -xz sextant
install -m 0755 sextant ~/.local/bin/sextantedge reports its version as edge, carries no release notes, and is replaced
without warning. It is for trying out unreleased work, not for depending on.
With Go:
go install github.com/runlevel-six/sextant/cmd/sextant@latest@latest resolves to the newest tagged release. Note that a go install build
reports its version as dev: the ldflags that stamp version, commit and date are
applied by the Makefile and the release pipeline, not by go install.
Every release ships a checksums.txt; verify with
sha256sum --ignore-missing -c checksums.txt.
Examples below are written ./sextant, for a binary in the current directory —
drop the ./ if you installed it onto your PATH.
./sextant --demo # the whole dashboard, no cluster needed
./sextant --list-contexts # what the resolver sees, and what it picked
./sextant --debug-snapshot -v # can it read your cluster? one line per source
./sextant # the dashboard, on your current context--demo runs against invented data — a control-plane rollout mid-flight, a host
that failed to provision, a node that has not come back — so you can see what the
tool does before pointing it at anything. Every screenshot below is a --demo
frame, which is also how they are regenerated:
./sextant --demo --render 280x84 # one frame to stdout, no TTY requiredKeys: ? help, tab cycle focus, 1–9 jump, z zoom, [/] columns,
p freeze, T theme, q quit.
./sextant --list-themes
./sextant --theme lcars
| Theme | Look | |
|---|---|---|
default |
green/amber/red on rounded borders | screenshot |
ansi |
the terminal's own sixteen colors, so it inherits your scheme | screenshot |
lcars |
LCARS-style console: black ground, block rails, amber and violet | screenshot |
ncurses |
DOS-era curses: blue panels, double-line boxes, white ink | screenshot |
Set one with --theme, SEXTANT_THEME, or theme: in the config file, or press
T to cycle through them live. A theme colors the chrome and the status
palette; it never rewrites data, so a context or cluster name reads the same
under all of them.
lcars is what it sounds like. It is a real theme rather than a hidden flag —
--list-themes names it, and the health colors still mean what they mean — but
nobody will mistake it for the sober option.
It is an homage built from color values and box-drawing characters: no fonts, artwork, or images from any source are included. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by CBS Studios or Paramount, and Star Trek and LCARS are the trademarks of their respective owners.
lcars and ncurses paint their own background rather than letting the
terminal's show through — every cell of the screen, header and footer included —
so they look the same on a light terminal as on a dark one. For lcars that is
not a preference: an LCARS panel is a colored block on an unlit screen, and the
black between the rails is the display itself, so the look does not survive being
dropped on a pale terminal.
ncurses is for anyone who spent the nineties in dialog and menuconfig.
Full documentation is in docs/, organized by what you are trying to do — a first rollout to learn it, how-to guides for a specific goal, reference for looking things up, and explanation for why it works the way it does.
Before you rely on it during a maintenance window, read What sextant reports — what this tool claims, what it refuses to claim, and how it says "I do not know".
clusterctl describe gives you a static tree. k9s browses resources but sees
CAPI objects as opaque CRs — it can't tell you that a KubeadmControlPlane is
3/5 rolled, or join a Machine to the physical host underneath it. Web
dashboards want a browser and a port-forward, which is the wrong shape when
you're SSH'd into a jump host at 2am during a maintenance window.
sextant is for that window.
- Zero-config on a stock cluster. Point it at a CAPI + Metal3 management cluster and it works. No site-specific setup required to see something useful.
- Site-specific behavior lives in data, not code. Node-role label keys, interesting namespaces, critical workloads and pane layout come from a YAML profile. Core Go contains no site-specific string literals.
- Optional subsystems auto-detect. Ceph, Cilium, MetalLB, OVN and OpenStack panes appear when those subsystems are present and disappear when they aren't — never an error you have to configure away.
- Degrade, don't fail. Missing
pods/execmeans a thinner pane, not a stack trace. - Read-only. sextant never issues a mutating API call.
git clone https://github.com/runlevel-six/sextant.git
cd sextant
make check # fmt + vet + test
make build # ./sextant
make help # all targetsContributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The most useful thing you can offer right now is a description of your cluster's shape, since the default profile is only as good as the range of clusters we know about.