Install the Wanaku server and CLI

Wanaku ships as a single wanaku-server binary and as container images. The Wanaku CLI is a separate download. This page lists every install method. The quickstart uses the installer script.

Choose a variant

Wanaku has two variants:

Variant	Archive name	Description
Full	wanaku-server-{version}-{platform}	Includes the embedded admin UI at http://localhost:8080/admin
Headless	wanaku-server-headless-{version}-{platform}	Does not include the admin UI. Use the management API or CLI to manage Wanaku. You can also include Wanaku in other tools.

Both variants provide the same MCP endpoint, management API, and filter pipeline. Only the full variant includes the admin UI.

IMPORTANT

Wanaku 0.3.0 is the first stable release of this server. Earlier releases contain the Java-based Wanaku, which is deprecated. The early-access builds are development builds of the next release. They change often.

Install the server

Select a variant for your use case. You can install it in one of three ways.

Use the server installer (Linux and macOS)

The installer downloads the archive of the latest stable release for your platform, verifies the checksum, and installs wanaku-server in $HOME/bin:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wanaku-ai/wanaku/main/get-wanaku.sh | bash

Set WANAKU_INSTALL_DIR to install in a different directory. To run Wanaku as a systemd service, install in /usr/local/bin, because the unit template uses that path:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wanaku-ai/wanaku/main/get-wanaku.sh | sudo WANAKU_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/bin bash

To install a different release, set WANAKU_RELEASE to its tag. For example, set WANAKU_RELEASE=early-access to install the latest development build:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wanaku-ai/wanaku/main/get-wanaku.sh | WANAKU_RELEASE=early-access bash

NOTE

The wanaku-barn repository has a different get-wanaku.sh script. That script installs the Wanaku CLI, not the server.

Download the archive manually

Download it from the latest release page. The archive contains a top-level directory with the same name as the archive. Extract the archive and move the binary to a directory in your PATH. Replace <archive> with the name of the archive that you downloaded, without the .tar.gz extension:

tar -xzf <archive>.tar.gz
sudo install -m 0755 <archive>/wanaku-server /usr/local/bin/wanaku-server

Use a container image

Pull the image for the selected variant:

# Full (with admin UI)
podman pull quay.io/wanaku/wanaku-server:0.3.0

# Headless (no admin UI)
podman pull quay.io/wanaku/wanaku-server-headless:0.3.0

You can use docker instead of podman in all commands. Read Run Wanaku in a container to start the image.

Install the CLI

The Wanaku CLI is a separate package. Download the latest wanaku binary from the wanaku-barn release page.

The full variant of the server also has a CLI Downloads page in the admin UI. After you start the server, go to http://localhost:8080 and select CLI Downloads in the side navigation. The headless variant does not include the admin UI.

chmod +x wanaku
sudo mv wanaku /usr/local/bin/

Verify the CLI installation:

wanaku --version

NOTE

The Wanaku CLI supports the Java-based Wanaku router and the Rust-based engine. Add the --no-auth flag when the router does not require authentication.

Next steps

• Quickstart: start the server and proxy your first MCP tool call.
• Run Wanaku in a container: start the container image with a configuration file and a volume.
• Run Wanaku as a systemd service: run the binary as a service on Linux.