Installation

Orchard ships as a single Go binary. There is no daemon, no server, and no database of its own — it reads HCL files and talks to the systems you configure.

Homebrew

On macOS and Linux:

brew install pthm/tap/orchard

Scoop

On Windows:

scoop bucket add pthm https://github.com/pthm/scoop-bucket
scoop install pthm/orchard

Install with Go

go install github.com/pthm/orchard@latest

This installs orchard into $GOBIN (defaulting to $HOME/go/bin). Make sure that directory is on your PATH.

Prebuilt binaries

Each GitHub release includes:

• .tar.gz archives for Linux and macOS, and .zip archives for Windows (amd64 and arm64)
• .deb and .rpm packages for Linux
• checksums.txt with SHA-256 sums for every artifact

Download the file for your platform, check it against checksums.txt, and put the orchard binary on your PATH (or install the package with dpkg -i / rpm -i).

Verify the install

orchard version

This prints the installed version, commit, and build date. Run orchard --help to see the available subcommands.

Requirements

• Go 1.25 or newer if installing with go install.
• A target system to drive. Orchard itself is just an orchestrator — you need something for it to talk to. For the built-in providers that means a reachable PostgreSQL or MySQL database (for builtin/postgres or builtin/mysql), a database file (for builtin/sqlite, which needs no server), an HTTP endpoint (for builtin/http), or a shell environment (for builtin/exec).