holos

Holistic Kubernetes platform manager using CUE

TLDR

Show the installed version

$ holos --version

Initialize a new platform in the current directory

$ holos init platform [v1alpha5]

Render the whole platform to deploy/ manifests

$ holos render platform

Render a single component

$ holos render component [path/to/component]

Render using an alternate platform directory

$ holos render platform --platform [path/to/platform]

List build plans the platform produces

$ holos show buildplans

SYNOPSIS

holos command [subcommand] [options]

Holos is a configuration management tool for Kubernetes that implements the rendered manifests pattern. Instead of templating YAML, platforms and their components are described in CUE; holos combines CUE specs with Helm charts and Kustomize overlays and writes the resulting manifests to disk so they can be committed to Git and applied by any GitOps controller (Argo CD, Flux, etc.).A platform consists of a root directory containing cue.mod/ and a generated platform.gen.cue describing a Platform resource. Each component lives in its own directory and exports a BuildPlan that holos render executes. The output is plain Kubernetes YAML under deploy/, which makes diffs reviewable and decouples rendering from cluster access.

PARAMETERS

--platform dir

Override the default platform directory (platform/) used as the rendering entry point.

--version

Print the Holos version and exit.

--help, -h

Show help for a command.

COMMANDS

init platform version

Scaffold a new platform using the given API version (e.g. v1alpha5). Creates platform/, cue.mod/, and platform.gen.cue.

render platform

Render every component of the platform into deploy/.

render component path

Render a single component directory.

show buildplans

Print the BuildPlan resources Holos will execute.

generate

Run code generators (e.g. regenerate CUE schemas from Kubernetes CRDs).

version

Print build and API version information.

help [command]

Show help for a command.

CAVEATS

Holos is pre-1.0 and the API is versioned per directory (v1alpha3, v1alpha4, v1alpha5, ...); mixing versions in one platform is not supported, and upgrading usually requires regenerating platform.gen.cue. CUE has a learning curve if you are coming from Helm/Kustomize-only workflows. The tool itself only renders manifests — applying them to a cluster is left to your GitOps controller or kubectl apply.

HISTORY

Started by Jeff McCune and the holos-run collective in 2023 to address drawbacks of pure templating in large multi-cluster Kubernetes platforms. Written in Go and CUE and released under Apache 2.0. Distributed via Homebrew (brew install holos-run/tap/holos) and as static binaries from GitHub releases.