Prerequisites

Your local machine and edge devices must meet the following requirements before you deploy applications.

Local machine requirements (administrator workstation)

  • Flight Control CLI (flightctl): Must be installed and authenticated to communicate with the central Flight Control service.
  • Helm CLI (v3.8+): Required only if you are building or managing Helm application packages.
  • Podman (v5.5+): Required to package and push OCI artifacts for Podman-based workloads.
  • An account on an OCI-compatible registry (such as Quay.io). You must have an active session by using podman login <registry_url>.

Device and environment requirements

The edge device must run an operating system image compatible with your application type:

If you are deploying…​ The device requires…​

Containers or Quadlets

An operating system image with Podman v5.5+ installed.

Helm applications

An operating system image with MicroShift installed. The agent deploys Helm charts directly into the MicroShift runtime.

Compose applications

An operating system image with Podman v5.5+ and a Compose provider installed. podman-compose is the tested, recommended provider. docker-compose v2 (standalone) is also accepted by the agent, but Red Hat Edge Manager does not validate against it. docker-compose does not require Docker Engine; it works through Podman’s compose interface.

VM applications

An operating system image with qemu-kvm, libvirt, and skopeo installed, CPU virtualization extensions enabled (Intel VT-x or AMD-V), and device paths /dev/kvm, /dev/net/tun, and /dev/vhost-net available. Only KVM/Libvirt on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (EL9 or EL10) is supported. Pull credentials for registry.redhat.io must be configured at /root/.config/containers/auth.json so the agent can pull the Red Hat virt-launcher image. The agent detects skopeo at startup; if you install skopeo after the agent is already running, restart the agent with sudo systemctl restart flightctl-agent.
Note

VM prerequisites are verified by the operator, not detected automatically by Red Hat Edge Manager. See Verify KVM readiness on an edge device for verification steps.
  • Podman: Version 5.5 or later is required for Quadlet and container applications (see table above).
  • User accounts for rootless applications: If you specify runAs: flightctl (or another non-root user) for container or quadlet applications, the user must exist on the device. Create the user in your bootc operating system image during the build process. See Build a bootc operating system image for how to add user creation to your Containerfile.
  • Network configuration: You must configure the pull-timeout settings so the agent does not stop a download early when the network is slow or the application image is large.
  • Operating system support: The device must run a supported operating system image (EL9 or EL10).
  • Pull credentials for VM applications: If the device runs VM applications, pull credentials for registry.redhat.io must be configured at /root/.config/containers/auth.json. See Configure pull credentials on an edge device for VM applications.
  • Your device must run an operating system image built for the Red Hat Edge Manager. You can use either the simplified image building workflow for a quick ready-to-use image or the advanced workflow to build a bootc operating system image with full customization.