Sylve aims to be a lightweight, open-source virtualization platform for FreeBSD, leveraging Bhyve for VMs and Jails for containerization, with deep ZFS integration. It seeks to provide a streamlined, Proxmox-like experience tailored for FreeBSD environments. Its backend is written in Go and the frontend is written in Svelte (with Kit).

We’re proud to be supported by:

• FreeBSD Foundation
• Alchemilla
• IPTechnics

You can also support the project by sponsoring us on GitHub.

These only apply to the development version of Sylve, the production version will be a single binary.

• Go >= 1.24
• Node.js >= v20.18.2
• NPM >= v10.9.2

Sylve is designed to run on FreeBSD 15.0 or later, and it is recommended to use the latest version of FreeBSD for the best experience.

Running Sylve is pretty easy, but sylve depends on some packages that you can install using pkg or the corresponding port to that package. Here's a list of what you'd need:

We also need to enable some services in order to run Sylve, you can drop these into /etc/rc.conf if you don't have it already:

sysrc ntpd_enable="YES" # Optional
sysrc ntpd_sync_on_start="YES" # Optional
sysrc zfs_enable="YES"
sysrc libvirtd_enable="YES" # Optional
sysrc dnsmasq_enable="YES" # Optional
sysrc samba_server_enable="YES" # Optional

Enabling rctl is required if you're using Jails with Sylve. Do this by adding the following line to /boot/loader.conf:

kern.racct.enable=1

Install required (and optional) packages:

pkg install git node24 npm-node24 go libvirt bhyve-firmware samba422 swtpm qemu-tools

Clone the repo and build Sylve.

git clone https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve.git
cd Sylve
make

cd bin/
cp -rf ../config.example.json config.json # Edit the config.json file to your liking
./sylve

1. Root access is required to run Sylve, as it manages system-level resources like networking, storage, jails, and virtual machines. Running without sufficient privileges will result in limited functionality and/or failures.

2. Since Bhyve doesn't support bootorders yet, you'll need to configure the order using the UEFI boot menu. You can download OS ISOs and Jail bases using the downloader present in Node > Utilities > Downloader menu.

3. ARM64 support is still pending for Libvirt so the support is not there yet, for everything else it should just work out of the box.

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our contributing guidelines.

This project is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License - see the LICENSE file for details.