# Quick Installation Guide

> Cordium documentation. Canonical page: <https://octelium.com/docs/cordium/latest/overview/quick-install>.

This is a quick guide for you to install a full-fledged single-node Cordium Cluster on any cheap Linux machine, VM or cloud VPS (e.g. DigitalOcean droplet, Hetzner, AWS EC2, etc...). This single-node Cluster is good enough for development, personal, or undemanding production use cases.

> **Note:**
>
> You can also use [Octelium Agent Skills](https://github.com/octelium/octelium-skills) with AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, etc...) to help you install Cordium and its underlying Octelium Cluster, create your first Users and Policies, and run your first Workspaces. Simply describe what you want to do, and your agent can prepare the configuration and run the relevant CLIs for you. You can find the installation instructions [here](https://github.com/octelium/octelium-skills#install) or via **Ask AI → AI agent skills** above.

> **Note:**
>
> To install a production, scalable multi-node Cluster over a typical cloud-based or on-premise Kubernetes installation, we recommend referring to this guide [here](https://octelium.com/docs/cordium/latest/install/cluster.md).

## Fresh Installation

This guide uses the exact same steps and exact same installer script used for the Octelium Cluster [quick installation guide](https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/overview/quick-install.md) as it installs an Octelium Cluster, and then it automatically installs the Cordium package at the end via the `--cordium` flag. To install the Cordium Cluster, simply SSH into your VPS/VM as the Linux `root` user and install the Cluster by running the following commands:

```bash
curl -o install-cluster.sh https://octelium.com/install-cluster.sh
chmod +x install-cluster.sh

# IMPORTANT: Replace <DOMAIN> with your actual domain/subdomain to be used as the Cluster domain
./install-cluster.sh --domain <DOMAIN> --cordium
```

The script should take a few minutes depending on your VM's capabilities to finish.

> **Note:**
>
> It's absolutely recommended to read the Octelium Cluster [quick installation guide](https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/overview/quick-install.md) to understand how to install and initialize the Cluster correctly.

## Installation on an Existing Octelium Cluster

If you already have a running Octelium Cluster that was installed via the [quick installation guide](https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/overview/quick-install.md), you only need to label the Kubernetes node as follows:

```bash
# This is the kubeconfig path inside the k3s cluster machine
export KUBECONFIG="/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml"

kubectl label nodes --all octelium.com/node-mode-cordium=
```

And then install the Cordium package as follows:

```bash
octops install-package <DOMAIN> --package cordium
# Or with an explicit kubeconfig path
octops install-package <DOMAIN> --package cordium --kubeconfig /path/to/kueconfig
```

## What Now?

Once you authenticate to the Cluster via the `octelium login` command shown to you at the end of the Cluster installation, you can now simply run your first Workspace as follows:

```bash
cordium run
```

You can also visit the Cordium web portal via your web browser at `https://cordium.<DOMAIN>` and run Workspaces and terminals from there.