v0.61.0 — Spinifex brings the cloud back in-house

Spinifex brings the cloud back in-house

moshcode install spinifex now installs Spinifex — EC2, EBS, S3, VPC and IAM, API-compatible with AWS, running on hardware you own.

moshcode install spinifex          # curl -fsSL https://install.mulgadc.com | bash
moshcode spinifex version          # straight through to the native `spx` CLI
moshcode spinifex ec2 describe-instances

It is the other end of the infra list. railway, doctl, supabase and the rest drive someone else's cloud; this one turns a bare-metal box, an edge node or an on-prem rack into one, so the same aws calls and Terraform providers point at machines you control.

The product is Spinifex and the binary is spx, so the registry carries both: moshcode tools lists spinifex, and moshcode spinifex … is exact passthrough to spx — the same split moshcode secrets already has with logicsrc. Arguments, stdin, stdout, stderr and the native exit code go straight through. spinifex(args…) works in .mosh scripts, and the name is in shell completions, /help, /tools and moshcode upgrade alongside the rest of the registry.

It is a host platform, not a binary drop

Spinifex installs system services, so its installer is the most invasive one in the registry, and this release is deliberate about two things.

It always needs root — it writes /usr/local/bin/spx, systemd units and scoped sudoers.d rules, and pulls QEMU/KVM, OVN/Open vSwitch and the AWS CLI through apt. Unlike tailscale, no platform gets a pass: Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13 are the supported hosts and there is no macOS build to delegate to. MoshCode asks for the password before the work starts rather than letting the installer stop for it partway through, which is what keeps an unattended moshcode update from parking on a prompt nobody is watching.

MoshCode also passes INSTALL_SPINIFEX_SKIP_NEWGRP=1. On a terminal the vendor script finishes by execing newgrp spinifex to activate the new group, which would replace the install with an interactive subshell — you would land in a shell instead of back in the pit, and inside moshcode update the rest of the plan would wait behind it. Log in again, or run newgrp spinifex yourself, to pick the group up.

One prerequisite MoshCode does not touch: the host's WAN interface must already be enslaved to a bridge named br-wan. Check it with ip -br link show br-wan before you install. The installer does not create it, bridging a live uplink can drop the box off the network, and that is not a decision an install command should make for you. Post-install — setup-ovn.sh --management, spx admin init, systemctl start spinifex.target — stays with Spinifex's own docs.

Re-running the installer is Spinifex's documented update path: it detects the existing install, replaces the binary, applies pending config migrations and restarts the services. So moshcode upgrade spinifex is the same command that installed it, which is exactly how coral and the other script-installed tools already behave.

Full changelog: v0.60.0...v0.61.0