Spinifex Admin CLI

Complete reference for the Spinifex administration CLI. Manage accounts, nodes, VMs, and services.

cliadminreference

Overview

The spx binary is the central administration tool for managing your Spinifex infrastructure. It provides commands for cluster initialization, account management, node operations, VM lifecycle, and service control. All services in the Spinifex platform are managed through this single binary.

Binary location: /usr/local/bin/spx

Instructions

Account Management

Create a new isolated account. This provisions a sequential 12-digit account ID, an admin user with an AdministratorAccess policy attached, and an access key pair. The credentials are written to ~/.aws/credentials and ~/.aws/config under a spinifex-<name> profile automatically.

bash

spx admin account create --name myteam

Account created successfully!
  Account ID:        000000000002
  Account Name:      myteam
  Admin User:        admin
  Access Key ID:     AKIA1A2B3C4D5E6F7890ABCD
  Secret Access Key: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
  AWS Profile:       spinifex-myteam

Use with:
  AWS_PROFILE=spinifex-myteam aws ec2 describe-instances

The secret access key is only shown once. It is saved to ~/.aws/credentials on the node where you ran the command; copy it from there if you need it elsewhere.

Set the profile to start using the account:

bash

export AWS_PROFILE=spinifex-myteam

To create additional users and scoped permissions within the account, see IAM Users and Policies.

List all accounts:

bash

spx admin account list

ACCOUNT ID     NAME                 STATUS     CREATED
----------     ----                 ------     -------
000000000000   system               ACTIVE     2026-07-03 02:17
000000000001   spinifex             ACTIVE     2026-07-03 02:17
000000000002   myteam               ACTIVE     2026-07-03 03:32

Node Management

List nodes in the cluster:

bash

spx get nodes

NAME    STATUS    IP              REGION           AZ               UPTIME   VMs
node1   Ready     127.0.0.1       ap-southeast-2   ap-southeast-2a  2m       0
node2   Ready     127.0.0.2       ap-southeast-2   ap-southeast-2a  2m       0
node3   Ready     127.0.0.3       ap-southeast-2   ap-southeast-2a  2m       0

Monitor Resources

bash

spx top nodes

Prints per-node CPU/memory usage and cluster-wide instance type availability.

Image Management

bash

spx admin images list
spx admin images import --name debian-13-arm64

Catalog imports verify the image against the catalog-declared SHA-256/SHA-512 digest before extraction. Use --file to import operator-supplied media (verification skipped — operator is responsible for integrity), or --force to re-download after a checksum mismatch.

EKS node image

To run EKS, import the prebuilt node image from the catalog:

bash

spx admin images import --name spinifex-eks-node

This pulls the Alpine + K3s node AMI from iso.mulgadc.com, verifies its checksum, and registers it tagged spinifex:managed-by=eks. eks create-cluster and eks create-nodegroup resolve the boot AMI by that tag, so no further configuration is needed.

Cluster Shutdown

Coordinated, phased shutdown of the entire cluster — running VMs are stopped before storage and control-plane services:

bash

spx admin cluster shutdown

Troubleshooting

Permission Denied Running Spinifex

The binary may not be executable. Fix permissions:

bash

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/spx

If you get permission errors during operations, ensure you're running with appropriate privileges. Some OVN and networking commands require sudo.

Services Fail to Start

Check the daemon logs for specific errors via systemctl/journalctl:

bash

systemctl status 'spinifex-*'
journalctl -u spinifex-daemon -f
journalctl -u 'spinifex-*' -f

Common causes include port conflicts, missing OVN configuration, or untrusted CA certificates.