Initializing Radius installs the Radius control-plane and creates a Radius Environment. The control-plane is a set of services that provide the core functionality of Radius, running in the radius-system namespace.

1. Create a Kubernetes cluster

   Radius runs inside Kubernetes. Create one from the supported k8s clusters

   If you don’t have a preferred way to create Kubernetes clusters, you could try using k3d, which runs a minimal Kubernetes distribution in Docker.

   Ensure your cluster is set as your current context:

   kubectl config current-context
   

2. Initialize a new Radius Environment with rad init:

   rad init
   

   Select Yes to setup the application in the current directory. This will create app.bicep and bicepconfig.json files

   Initializing Radius...
   
   🕔 Install Radius edge
      - Kubernetes cluster: kind
      - Kubernetes namespace: radius-system
   ⏳ Create new environment default
      - Kubernetes namespace: default
      - Recipe pack: local-dev
   ⏳ Scaffold application
   ⏳ Update local configuration
   

3. Verify the initialization by running:

   kubectl get deployments -n radius-system
   

   You should see:

   NAME                      READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   applications-rp           1/1     1            1           53s
   bicep-de                  1/1     1            1           53s
   controller                1/1     1            1           53s
   ucp                       1/1     1            1           53s
   contour-contour           1/1     1            1           46s
   

   You can also use rad env list to view your environment:

   rad env list