Installation

Kranz supports macOS and Linux on x86-64 and ARM64. Windows is not supported natively, because process-group and listener inspection use Unix facilities; see WSL 2 for the supported way to run it on Windows.

Homebrew

brew install kranz-org/tap/kranz
kranz --version

Homebrew installs a published release archive and verifies its checksum.

Go install

With Go 1.26 or newer:

go install github.com/kranz-org/kranz/cmd/kranz@latest

Debian and Ubuntu

VERSION=0.16.5
ARCH=amd64  # use arm64 on an ARM machine
curl -fLO "https://github.com/kranz-org/kranz/releases/download/v${VERSION}/kranz_${VERSION}_linux_${ARCH}.deb"
sudo apt install "./kranz_${VERSION}_linux_${ARCH}.deb"
kranz --version

Change VERSION when installing another release. The package installs the binary into /usr/bin, shell completions for bash, zsh, and fish, and the documentation into /usr/share/doc/kranz.

Remove it with sudo apt remove kranz.

Fedora, RHEL, and Rocky

VERSION=0.16.5
ARCH=amd64  # use arm64 on an ARM machine
sudo dnf install "https://github.com/kranz-org/kranz/releases/download/v${VERSION}/kranz_${VERSION}_linux_${ARCH}.rpm"
kranz --version

Remove it with sudo dnf remove kranz.

The packages define no system account, no unit file, and start no service on install. Kranz supervises processes owned by whoever invokes it and keeps its runtime state under that user's directories, so there is nothing system-wide to configure afterwards.

Windows (WSL 2)

Kranz runs under WSL 2 as an ordinary Linux install. Inside your distribution, use the Debian or Fedora instructions above, or go install.

Two things are worth knowing:

• Keep the project on the Linux filesystem. A project under /mnt/c is reached through a translation layer, where file watching is unreliable and every process start is slower. Detecting configuration edits depends on watching, so a project under $HOME behaves correctly and one under /mnt/c may not notice edits before an explicit reload.
• Ports are shared with Windows. WSL 2 forwards listening ports to the Windows host, so kranz ports and the port conflict checks see the same numbers your browser does. A port held by a Windows process appears as taken.

A runtime started in one WSL terminal is visible from another WSL terminal of the same distribution, because both share the user's runtime directory. It is not visible from Windows itself, and not from a different distribution.

GitHub releases

Download an archive from GitHub Releases, verify it against checksums.txt, and put kranz on your PATH.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/kranz-org/kranz.git
cd kranz
make build
./bin/kranz

make install installs the current checkout into GOBIN or GOPATH/bin, and make dev builds bin/kranz-dev so you can exercise a checkout without replacing an installed kranz.

Shell completion

The Linux packages install completions already. For any other installation:

kranz completion bash > /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/kranz
kranz completion zsh  > "${fpath[1]}/_kranz"
kranz completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/kranz.fish

Completion covers commands, subcommands, and each command's own options, including the values of options that take a fixed set.