hackenv

Access your Kali Linux and Parrot Security instances with ease.

hackenv lets you comfortably manage your hacking environment from the terminal.

   

🤘 Features

• Support for Kali Linux and Parrot Security.
• Create short-lived virtual machines within seconds.
• Download the latest official live image conveniently, verified against the vendor's signature.
• Simple and intuitive command line interface.
• Configure instant SSH access based on public-key authentication.
• Set up a shared directory between host and guest.
• No root privileges, no system daemon, no network bridge: everything runs in your user session.

🚀 Installation

The preferred way is to download the binary for amd64 or arm64 from the latest release. Alternatively, build it yourself.

hackenv needs libvirt 9.0 or newer, QEMU with KVM, passt, OpenSSH, and virt-viewer or Remmina for the GUI. Install them for your distribution:

Distribution	Install dependencies
Fedora 40+	sudo dnf install libvirt-daemon-kvm qemu-kvm passt virt-viewer openssh-clients
Debian 12+, LMDE 6+	sudo apt install libvirt-daemon libvirt-clients qemu-system-x86 passt virt-viewer openssh-client
Ubuntu 24.04+, Linux Mint 22+	sudo apt install libvirt-daemon libvirt-clients qemu-system-x86 passt virt-viewer openssh-client
Arch Linux and derivatives	sudo pacman -S libvirt qemu-desktop passt virt-viewer openssh
RHEL 9.2+, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS Stream 9+	sudo dnf install libvirt qemu-kvm passt virt-viewer openssh-clients

On Debian, Ubuntu and their derivatives, add yourself to the kvm group and log in again so that your user can open /dev/kvm:

sudo usermod -aG kvm "$USER"

Finally, run hackenv doctor. It checks every prerequisite and tells you what is missing.

Note

openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap 15.6, Pop!_OS 24.04 and Gentoo ship recent enough versions of libvirt and passt according to their package lists, but have not been tested. Ubuntu 22.04, Linux Mint 21, Debian 11 and RHEL 8 ship a libvirt older than 9.0 and are not supported. Alpine Linux (musl) and NixOS (no FHS library paths) cannot run the release binary; build from source there.

⚡ Quick Start

hackenv get   # download and verify the latest Kali Linux image
hackenv up    # boot the VM and set up SSH and the shared directory
hackenv ssh   # open a shell in the VM
hackenv gui   # or open its desktop
hackenv down  # shut the VM down and discard its state

Add --type=parrot to any command to work with Parrot Security instead.

📄 Usage

Choosing a Distribution

hackenv operates with Kali Linux by default. Pass --type=parrot to work with Parrot Security instead, or set it permanently through $HACKENV_TYPE or the configuration file. Both distributions can be used side by side; each has its own image, VM and SSH port.

Downloading an Image

hackenv get downloads the latest live image into ~/.local/share/hackenv. Parrot Security is fetched from the official mirrors over HTTPS. hackenv picks Parrot's tuned image, which is built for x86-64-v3 CPUs (Intel Haswell, AMD Ryzen and newer); on an older CPU, download the regular Parrot-security-<version>_amd64.iso yourself and import it with --file. Kali Linux publishes its live images only as torrents, so hackenv downloads them with a built-in BitTorrent client: it only leeches, uses a random port, and exits as soon as the image is complete. The download can take a while, so sit back and enjoy some tea. An interrupted torrent download resumes when you run the command again.

Before anything is downloaded, hackenv verifies the vendor's OpenPGP signature on the checksum file using the public keys embedded in the binary, and then checks the image against that file.

Vendor	Signing key fingerprint
Kali Linux	827C 8569 F251 8CC6 77FE CA1A ED65 462E C8D5 E4C5
Parrot Security	B711 8223 4655 2E4D 92DA 02DF 7A82 86AF 0E81 EE4A

Flag	Purpose
--update	Download the latest release when you already have an older image.
--force	Download even if the latest image is already present.
--yes	Answer yes to all questions.
--file PATH	Import an image you already have instead of downloading one, for example an older release or the regular Parrot Security image. It is copied as is and not verified, so make sure it is authentic. Keep the vendor's filename, hackenv reads the release from it.
--signing-key FILE	Verify with this armored public key instead of the embedded one, for when a vendor rotates its key before hackenv ships the new one.
--skip-signature	Bypass the signature check entirely. Meant as a last resort.

Warning

If you run SELinux, label the new image before booting it: hackenv fix apply-labels. See Troubleshooting for details.

Starting the VM

hackenv up boots the virtual machine. Once this command is finished, the VM is running and fully configured. The VM is short-lived (volatile), meaning any data and configuration stored outside the shared directory is removed once the machine shuts down. This is by design and admittedly opinionated.

Flag	Default	Purpose
--memory	4G	RAM of the VM, for example 8G or 4096M. Capped at the memory of your host.
--cores	2	Number of virtual CPU cores.
--ssh-port	2222 (Kali), 2223 (Parrot)	Host port forwarded to the SSH server of the VM. Pick another one if it is taken.

The VM uses user-mode networking via passt, so no bridge or privileges are needed. Its SSH server is reachable at 127.0.0.1 on the port above. hackenv up logs which host features it detected (machine type, CPU mode, video model) and picks sensible fallbacks when a modern one is missing.

Connecting to the VM

• hackenv ssh opens an SSH session using the key hackenv generated for you.
• hackenv gui opens the desktop of the VM in virt-viewer (or Remmina with --viewer=remmina); add --fullscreen if you like.
• hackenv status prints whether the VM is running.
• hackenv down shuts the VM down and discards its state.

Sharing Files

hackenv automatically sets up a shared directory between the host and the virtual machine. On the host side the directory is ~/.local/share/hackenv/shared, while on the guest side it is located at /shared. It is shared through 9p in mapped mode, so everything the guest writes belongs to your host user.

Troubleshooting

hackenv doctor checks every prerequisite: the libvirt library and session, KVM, passt, OpenSSH, the viewer, SELinux labels, the expiry of the embedded signing keys, and whether an image is present. Run it first whenever something does not work.

If SELinux denies access to the image or the shared directory, you have to adjust the context of those files. hackenv fix apply-labels (or ./bin/hackenv_applylabels) relabels the downloaded images and the shared directory, and hackenv doctor reports what still lacks the label. If you add new files to the shared directory from outside, do not forget to label them as well. On hosts without SELinux the command does nothing.

⚙ Configuration

Every flag can also be set through an environment variable or a YAML config file. Check out the help (--help) of a command to see the variable names. Command line flags win over environment variables, which win over the config file.

The config file lives at ~/.config/hackenv/config.yaml (or wherever $XDG_CONFIG_HOME points), and --config FILE selects another one. Global flags are top-level keys, flags of a command are nested under the command name:

type: parrot
up:
  memory: 8G
  cores: 4
  ssh-port: 2300

If you work with both operating systems, then I recommend using shell aliases:

alias kali='hackenv --type=kali'
alias parrot='hackenv --type=parrot'

🔨 Building from Source

go install -tags libvirt_dlopen,nosqlite,purego_utp github.com/eikendev/hackenv/cmd/...@latest

Building needs a C compiler and the libvirt development headers (libvirt-devel on Fedora, libvirt-dev on Debian and Ubuntu). The resulting binary loads the libvirt client library at runtime, which every libvirt installation provides (libvirt-libs on Fedora, libvirt0 on Debian and Ubuntu), so one build runs on any libvirt 9.0 or newer.

💡 Alternatives

If you do not like this tool, the following options are worth checking out:

• Vagrant in combination with VirtualBox
• Docker or Podman