Chapter 2. Prerequisites

Your local machine and edge devices must meet the following requirements before you deploy applications.

Local machine requirements (administrator workstation)

Flight Control CLI (flightctl): Must be installed and authenticated to communicate with the central Flight Control service.
Helm CLI (v3.8+): Required only if you are building or managing Helm application packages.
Podman (v5.5+): Required to package and push OCI artifacts for Podman-based workloads.
An account on an OCI-compatible registry (such as Quay.io). You must have an active session by using podman login <registry_url>.

Device and environment requirements

The edge device must run an operating system image compatible with your application type:

Expand

If you are deploying…	The device requires…
Containers or Quadlets	An operating system image with Podman v5.5+ installed.
Helm applications	An operating system image with MicroShift installed. The agent deploys Helm charts directly into the MicroShift runtime.

Podman: Version 5.5 or later is required for Quadlet and container applications (see table above).
Podman Compose: The device’s operating system image must have the podman-compose tool preinstalled.
User accounts for rootless applications: If you specify runAs: flightctl (or another non-root user) for container or quadlet applications, the user must exist on the device. Create the user in your bootc operating system image during the build process. See Build a bootc operating system image for how to add user creation to your Containerfile.
Network configuration: You must configure the pull-timeout settings so the agent does not stop a download early when the network is slow or the application image is large.
Operating system support: The device must run a supported operating system image (EL9 or EL10).
Your device must run an operating system image built for the Red Hat Edge Manager. You can use either the simplified image building workflow for a quick ready-to-use image or the advanced workflow to build a bootc operating system image with full customization.