Installation Guide

Trailer.dev ships as as pre-built binaries.

There are binaries available for Linux, Windows and macOS (Darwin) for the server component.
There are binaries available for Linux and Windows for the agent component.
There are binaries available for Linux and Windows for the standalone mode.

Trailer.dev binaries are pre-built for arm64 and amd64 architectures.

All pre-built binaries are signed by our minisign key. The public part can be found in our Community repository.

Trailer.dev also ships as an OCI image.

There images based on an Alpine base image for our standalone, agent and server components.

All official OCI images are signed by cosign and can be verified with our public cosign key found in our Community repository.

Deployment modes

Trailer runs in one of three modes:

Standalone: server and Docker agent in one process. Easiest single-host setup.
Server: the API, database, and web UI only. Pair it with one or more remote agents.
Agent: connects to a server and reconciles workspaces against a container runtime.

The standalone and agent deployments require a Docker unix socket. See the Architecture Overview for how the pieces interact.

Using Docker (recommended)

The published images are standalone, server, and agent.

Pull the standalone image:

docker pull ghcr.io/trailer-dev/standalone:latest

Run it. The agent talks to the host Docker daemon, so mount the socket. Mount a volume for the database so data survives restarts:

docker run -d \
  --name trailer \
  -p 8090:8090 \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v trailer_data:/trailer_data \
  ghcr.io/trailer-dev/standalone:latest

The web interface listens on port 8090 by default. Both the host and the port (as well as the app’s public URL) can be configured. Check the configuration reference for supported configuration keys and their default values.

Using pre-built binaries

Each release publishes archives for the standalone, server, and agent builds (Linux, macOS, and Windows where applicable; amd64 and arm64).

Download the archive for your platform from the GitHub releases page. Archives are named like trailer-standalone-linux_amd64, trailer-server-..., and trailer-agent-.... The binary inside is named trailer.
Move it onto your PATH:
Terminal window
```
sudo mv trailer /usr/local/bin/
```
Run it:
Terminal window
```
trailer
```

Configuration

Runtime config is read from ~/.config/trailer.dev/config.yml (XDG config home). The file is created with defaults on first run if it does not exist. Every value can be overridden by a CLI flag or environment variable.

Common options (see trailer --help):

--server-url (default http://localhost:8090): address the server listens on, and the address the agent connects to.
--deployment-name: name shown for this agent in the connected instance (defaults to the hostname).
--data-directory (default trailer_data): directory for the database.
--build-directory (default /tmp): where the agent builds images.

For the complete list, see the Configuration Reference.

Verify the install