Jerboa

Unikernel engine for building, running, and orchestrating VM-based application images.

What It Is

Jerboa is split into two parts:

jerboa: the CLI
jerboad: the daemon that owns builds, images, VM lifecycle, networks, and compose state

The daemon is Linux-only. On Windows, the CLI runs on the host and boots the daemon inside a dedicated WSL2 distro managed by jerboa daemon.

Build unikernel images from:
- static ELF binaries
- Go, Node.js, Python, Rust, and raw projects
Run VMs on:
- QEMU
- Firecracker
Manage:
- images
- volumes
- bridge networks with TAP-backed guest connectivity
- internal DNS
- compose stacks
Observe:
- VM logs
- live stats
- Prometheus metrics
- OTLP traces
- a read-only dashboard

Native VM execution requires Linux.
Port publishing requires a managed network (--network).
TCP publishing works today through a userspace forwarder.
UDP port mappings parse and persist, but the current forwarder skips them with a warning.
The daemon binary is built only for Linux; Windows uses WSL2.

cmd/jerboa/ - CLI commands
cmd/jerboad/ - daemon entrypoint
cmd/jerboa-agent/ and internal/agent/ - local HTTP/SSE sidecar for the desktop app
internal/vm/ - VM lifecycle, QEMU, Firecracker, stats, persistence
internal/image/ - image store and build pipeline
internal/network/ - bridge, TAP, IPAM, port forwarder
internal/compose/ - compose parser and ordering
internal/wsldistro/ and internal/wslboot/ - Windows/WSL integration
tests/integration/ and tests/e2e/ - higher-level verification
kernel/ - Nanos-derived kernel tree and tooling

Current released versions (regenerated from those files on every docs deploy):