The Smallstep agent manages certificates for all your DevOps workloads.

System Requirements

• Supported operating systems:
  • Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, etc)
  • Ubuntu (Current Stable and LTS releases)
  • Debian (Current Releases)
  • Fedora (Current Releases)
• We support amd64 and arm64 architectures
• The following packages are used:
  • polkitd, to give the agent service manager privileges
  • p11-kit and tpm-tss2, for TPM 2.0 integration
• The following directories are used by default:
  • runtime state in /run/step-agent
  • configuration in /etc/step-agent
  • certificates in/var/lib/step-agent and in your configured locations
• The agent will connect to the following Smallstep hosts:
  • Your CA: <your-team>.ca.smallstep.com and subdomains
  • Agent API: control.infra.smallstep.com
  • Smallstep API: gateway.smallstep.com
  • TPM Attestation CA: att.smallstep.com

Install prerequisites

Install the following prerequisite packages:

• curl
• polkitd
• p11-kit
• tpm-tss2

Install options

Now you’ll install the Smallstep agent.

Ansible Installation

See the ansible-collection-agent collection for installation and configuration instructions.

Linux package installation

See our Linux server quickstart for Fedora, Debian, CentOS, and Ubuntu packages.

Binary Installation

Start by downloading and installing the step-agent-plugin binary:

curl -L -o step-agent-plugin dl.smallstep.com/step-agent-plugin/latest/step-agent-plugin_linux && sudo install -m 0755 -t /usr/bin step-agent-plugin