Declarative, layered, IPv6-first system-container appliances, compatible with TurnKey Linux appliances.
A fork of TurnKey Linux 19 (Debian 13) that makes the LXC appliance behave like a cloud instance: described in one file, built from signed layers, reachable on its own address, and upgradable in place.
TurnKey appliances are excellent on day zero and hard to keep on day two. Keel keeps the appliances and corrects the model around them.
An instance spec describes hostname, IPv6 networking, domain and certificate policy, services, users and secrets by reference. Applying it converges the appliance and is safe to re-run. The interactive console writes the same file.
Core, stack and app are separate read-only layers, each with a sha256, listed in a plain-text manifest signed by the project key and tied to a git commit. Same commit and same manifest give the same bytes.
Every appliance gets a routable address of its own, such as 2001:db8:4b1::10, with an ACME certificate and host identity keys. No NAT traversal, no port mapping. IPv4 is optional and never assumed.
Platform upgrades and application schema upgrades are kept apart. The second runs with a return point, the upstream tool, validation and rollback, so an appliance follows Debian releases instead of being reinstalled.
An appliance is a core layer, a stack layer and an app layer, assembled from a manifest. The layers are built by the same tools TurnKey uses today, one deterministic tarball each.
Unmodified TurnKey 19.0 recipes, built as layers.
Every change ships with tests. The forked repositories keep at least 90 percent coverage; code the project writes keeps 95 percent.
Commands, defaults and configuration examples use IPv6 addresses, such as [2001:db8:4b1::10]:22. IPv4 is optional and never assumed.
Commits, code comments, documentation and pull requests are written in English.
Forks keep the upstream history and the upstream remote. No squashing, no force pushes, cherry-picks with attribution.
Full init, journal, cron, SSH and filesystem-level backup. Tests run on LXC with native systemd against real databases. No other container model is involved.
The build host reproduces unmodified TurnKey 19.0 from the forked repositories. That is the baseline every later change is measured against, and it passed before anything else started.
The first bug fixes are on branches, and the first pieces of the library (the instance spec and layer verification) exist with full test coverage. Nothing is published for end users yet: no images, no packages, no layer repository.
inspect, apply and diff for a running appliance, with the console writing the same file.