What is arkade?

Arkade is a command-line tool that installs developer tools and Kubernetes applications faster than using a system package manager. Instead of visiting multiple websites, reading separate README files for each tool, and running different install commands per operating system, you run a single arkade command and it fetches the correct binary for your platform automatically. The arkade get command covers over 190 CLI tools including kubectl, kind, helm, terraform, jq, flux, and many others. It always pulls the latest version, figures out whether you are on Linux, macOS, or Windows and whether you have an x86, ARM, or Apple Silicon processor, and downloads the right file. This makes it useful both on personal machines and inside CI pipelines on GitHub Actions, where setting up a set of tools at the start of a workflow would otherwise require multiple steps. The second main capability is arkade install, which deploys Kubernetes applications into a running cluster. It wraps over 50 common Helm charts and manifests for things like ingress-nginx, cert-manager, Postgres, ArgoCD, and others. It exposes the most common configuration options as straightforward flags rather than requiring you to write or edit a values.yaml file, though raw Helm overrides via --set are also supported. After installation, arkade info prints the post-install instructions for that app. Arkade also has utilities for working with Helm charts: it can scan a chart's image references, check whether newer versions exist, and update them in place. There is support for installing packages from OCI images, which is a newer container-based distribution format. The tool is written in Go, works on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and is released under the MIT license. A GitHub Actions integration is available for using it in automated workflows. The full README is longer than what was shown.