Overview: Radius installation

Learn how to get install Radius tooling and services

Radius consists of a set of tools and services that together form the Radius platform.

Step 1: Install the rad CLI

The rad CLI manages your applications, resources, and environments. You can install it on your local machine with the following installation scripts:

wget -q "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/radius-project/radius/main/deploy/install.sh" -O - | /bin/bash

To try out an unstable release visit the edge docs.

curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/radius-project/radius/main/deploy/install.sh" | /bin/bash

To try out an unstable release visit the edge docs.

Run the following in a PowerShell window:

iwr -useb "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/radius-project/radius/main/deploy/install.ps1" | iex

You may need to refresh your $PATH environment variable to access rad:

$Env:Path = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","User")

To try out an unstable release visit the edge docs.

Radius offers a free Codespace option for getting up and running with a Radius environment in seconds:

Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources.

Azure Cloud Shell for bash doesn’t have a sudo command, so users are unable to install Radius to the default /usr/local/bin installation path. To install the rad CLI to the home directory, run the following commands:

export RADIUS_INSTALL_DIR=./
wget -q "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/radius-project/radius/main/deploy/install.sh" -O - | /bin/bash

You can now run the rad CLI with ./rad.

PowerShell for Cloud Shell is currently not supported.

Visit Radius GitHub releases to select and download a specific version of the rad CLI.

You may be prompted for your sudo password during installation, as the installer places the rad binary under /usr/local/bin. If you are unable to sudo you can install the rad CLI to another directory by setting the RADIUS_INSTALL_DIR environment variable with your intended install path. Make sure you add this to your path (Unix, Windows) if you wish to reference it via rad, like in the docs.

Verify the rad CLI is installed correctly by running rad version.

Example output:

RELEASE     VERSION     BICEP       COMMIT
0.41.0      v0.41        0.28.1     2e60bfb46de73ec5cc70485d53e67f8eaa914ba7

Step 2: Install the VS Code extension

Visual Studio Code offers the best authoring experience for Radius and Bicep. Download and install the Bicep extension to easily author and validate Bicep templates:

Disable the Radius Bicep extension

We previously released a version of the official Bicep extension specific to Radius called the Radius Bicep extension. We have since updated Radius to be compatible with the official Bicep extension. You can only have one VSCode Bicep extension installed at a time to build on Radius. If you have the Radius Bicep extension installed, you will need to uninstall it and use only the official Bicep extension.

To install the Bicep extension, refer to their installation documentation

Step 3: Initialize Radius

Initializing Radius installs the Radius control-plane and creates a Radius Environment. The control-plane is a set of services that provide the core functionality of Radius, running in the radius-system namespace.

Create a Kubernetes cluster

Radius runs inside Kubernetes. Create one from the supported k8s clusters

If you don’t have a preferred way to create Kubernetes clusters, you could try using k3d, which runs a minimal Kubernetes distribution in Docker.

Ensure your cluster is set as your current context:
```
kubectl config current-context
```

Initialize a new Radius Environment with rad init:

rad init

Select Yes to setup the application in the current directory. This will create app.bicep and bicepconfig.json files

Initializing Radius...

🕔 Install Radius v0.41
   - Kubernetes cluster: kind
   - Kubernetes namespace: radius-system
⏳ Create new environment default
   - Kubernetes namespace: default
   - Recipe pack: local-dev
⏳ Scaffold application
⏳ Update local configuration

Verify the initialization by running:

kubectl get deployments -n radius-system

You should see:

NAME                      READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
applications-rp           1/1     1            1           53s
bicep-de                  1/1     1            1           53s
controller                1/1     1            1           53s
ucp                       1/1     1            1           53s
contour-contour           1/1     1            1           46s

You can also use rad env list to view your environment:

rad env list

If you are looking to upgrade Radius to the latest version, refer to upgrade Radius on Kubernetes for more information.

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