Download Krill Server and Desktop App on Debian Based Systems

Setup Krill on Debian Based Systems

Please note that Krill is currently in beta and may have breaking changes in future releases.

Krill runs on most debian based systems including Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS. It was born out of a Raspberry Pi and can control GPIO pins and serial Devices.

Krill Requires Java 21 or later. In order to use the header pins of a Raspberry Pi, you’ll need Java 25 or later and first install the wrapper service krill-pi4j (see below).

On most Ubuntu/Debian systems, you can install OpenJDK 21 with: sudo apt install openjdk-21-jre-headless

If you’re installing on a Raspberry Pi, there isn’t an official build of Java 25 for ARM64 yet, so you’ll need to use Azul Zulu OpenJDK.

sudo apt install curl gnupg ca-certificates
curl -s https://repos.azul.com/azul-repo.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/azul.gpg
echo "deb [arch=arm64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/azul.gpg] https://repos.azul.com/zulu/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zulu.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install zulu25-jdk-headless

Setup our APT Repository

sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings

curl -fsSL https://deb.krill.zone/krill-archive-keyring.gpg \
  | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/krill-archive-keyring.gpg

sudo chmod 0644 /etc/apt/keyrings/krill-archive-keyring.gpg

sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/krill.sources > /dev/null <<EOF
Types: deb
URIs: https://deb.krill.zone
Suites: stable
Components: main
Architectures: $(dpkg --print-architecture)
Signed-By: /etc/apt/keyrings/krill-archive-keyring.gpg
EOF

sudo apt update

If you want to control the header pins of a Raspberry Pi you need to include the krill-pi4j package which includes a wrapper service for the Pi4J library. This is required to run Krill with Java 25 or later on a Raspberry Pi. This is an Open Source library we made that exposed the Pi4J API using gRPC to use the modern JDK 25 FFM API.

You can now install Krill Server or Desktop with:

sudo apt install krill

# or

sudo apt install krill-desktop

# Raspberry Pi Server:

sudo apt install krill-pi4j krill

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Last verified: 2026-04-03