Quilt Developer Docs
QuiltDeveloper Docs

Tooling

quiltc

Quilt's control-plane CLI for clusters, nodes, workloads, and k8s workflows.

quiltc is Quilt’s control-plane CLI.

If the HTTP API is the engine, quiltc is a well-designed dashboard over that engine.

GitHub: ariacomputecompany/quiltc

What quiltc Is For

  • create and inspect clusters
  • mint join tokens
  • register, heartbeat, drain, or delete nodes
  • create, update, or delete workloads
  • reconcile placements
  • watch long-running operations
  • validate, diff, and apply Kubernetes manifests against Quilt backend endpoints

Auth Inputs

QUILT_BASE_URL
QUILT_API_KEY
QUILT_JWT
QUILT_JOIN_TOKEN

Use QUILT_JOIN_TOKEN specifically for node registration flows.

Core Mental Model

  • cluster = desired-state control plane
  • node = participating host
  • workload = replicated application spec
  • placement = scheduler assignment

This matches the control-plane nouns from the cluster API page.

Common Flows

quiltc clusters create --name demo --pod-cidr 10.70.0.0/16 --node-cidr-prefix 24
quiltc clusters list
quiltc clusters get <cluster_id>

Behavioral Notes

  • quiltc wraps the platform over HTTP
  • do not assume local runtime CLIs are the canonical interface
  • apply and diff require --cluster-id
  • apply validates first by default
  • --dry-run on k8s apply gives validate-plus-diff behavior without mutating backend state

Why People Like quiltc

It removes the little mistakes that hand-written HTTP calls often introduce:

  • missing auth env vars
  • wrong body shape
  • missing registration fields
  • forgetting to follow long-running operations

When to Use the CLI vs Raw HTTP

SituationBetter choice
Repeated human workflowsquiltc
Scripting against the raw control planeHTTP API
Learning the platform surfaceboth together

A Very Practical Starting Point

1

Set your base URL and auth

export QUILT_BASE_URL="https://backend.quilt.sh"
export QUILT_API_KEY="..."
2

Inspect the cluster surface

quiltc clusters list
3

Try a runtime call too

quiltc containers create '{"name":"demo","command":["sh","-lc","echo hi; tail -f /dev/null"],"memory_limit_mb":256}'
4

Watch the returned operation

quiltc operations watch <operation_id> --timeout-secs 300