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This guide walks you through spinning up a local Talos Linux cluster using Docker and talosctl in a few minutes.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following tools installed:

Create the cluster

With your prerequisites in place, run the following command to create a cluster on Docker:
talosctl cluster create docker
If you are using Docker Desktop on macOS and encounter the error: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?, you may need to manually create the Docker socket symlink:sudo ln -s "$HOME/.docker/run/docker.sock" /var/run/docker.sock
Once the cluster is up, verify that you can reach Kubernetes by running:
kubectl get nodes -o wide
You should see output similar to the following: From here, you can explore the Talos API using talosctl:
talosctl --help

Destroy the cluster

When you are done, run the following command to tear down the cluster and clean up all associated resources:
talosctl cluster destroy