Your First Enclave

This guide walks you through setting up a Tentacular enclave for your team and deploying a tentacle into it. You’ll use The Kraken Slack bot for the enclave setup and the tntc CLI for tentacle deployment.

Prerequisites

• The Kraken bot installed in your Slack workspace
• A Kubernetes cluster with the Tentacular MCP server installed (tntc cluster check should pass)
• tntc CLI installed and authenticated (tntc login)

Step 1: Create a Slack Channel

Create a Slack channel for your team’s work. The channel name becomes the enclave name, so choose something meaningful and lowercase-friendly.

/create channel #marketing-automations

Invite The Kraken to the channel:

/invite @kraken

At this point, The Kraken is in the channel but not yet active — it’s in regular (non-interactive) mode and will not respond to general messages.

Step 2: Initialize the Enclave

Tell The Kraken to set up the channel as a managed workspace. You must be the Slack channel owner to do this.

@kraken set up this channel for our team

The Kraken will:

1. Verify you are the channel owner
2. Ask two quick questions to determine the right resource allocation (CPU, memory, storage)
3. Provision the enclave: Kubernetes namespace, Postgres database, S3 storage, RBAC, network policies, and resource quota
4. Post OIDC sign-in links for everyone in the channel

This takes about 10–20 seconds. When it’s done, The Kraken confirms:

This channel is now your team's workspace. I need everyone to sign in
before we start — it's a one-time security check. [Sign in link]

Note

If you prefer the CLI, you can provision an enclave directly:

tntc enclave provision --name marketing-automations \
  --owner alice@company.com \
  --channel-id C08XXXXXXX \
  --channel-name marketing-automations

Step 3: Sign In (All Team Members)

Each person in the channel — including you — needs to complete OIDC sign-in once. This links their Slack identity to their cluster identity and registers them as an enclave member.

Click the sign-in link The Kraken posted. A browser window opens, prompts for your company SSO credentials, and closes. The Kraken posts a confirmation in the channel when each person completes sign-in.

After everyone has signed in:

Everyone's verified. You're all set up. What would you like to automate?

Step 4: Invite Team Members to the Channel

If you need to add more people after initial setup, invite them to the Slack channel the normal way:

/invite @bob @carol

The Kraken detects the new members and sends them sign-in links automatically. Once they complete OIDC sign-in, they’re registered as enclave members.

To verify the current member list:

tntc enclave info marketing-automations

Step 5: Deploy Your First Tentacle

With the enclave active, deploy a tentacle into it using the --enclave flag. The enclave flag tells tntc which namespace to use and automatically applies the enclave’s permission defaults.

Tentacles for this enclave live at ~/tentacles/marketing-automations/<tentacle-name>/ on disk. This is the working copy in the three-layer model — source is modified here, committed to Git, then deployed to the cluster.

cd ~/tentacles/marketing-automations/my-tentacle
tntc deploy --enclave marketing-automations

Without the --enclave flag, tntc attempts to infer the enclave from context. If you belong to exactly one enclave, it auto-resolves. With multiple enclaves, the flag is required.

You can also ask The Kraken to help build and deploy a tentacle:

@kraken build me a workflow that checks competitor pricing every morning
and posts a summary here

The Kraken handles the full cycle: clarifying questions, scaffold selection, build, test, and deploy.

Step 6: Check Enclave Status

Verify the enclave and the newly deployed tentacle are healthy:

# Enclave overview
tntc enclave info marketing-automations

# Tentacle status within the enclave
tntc status marketing-automations/competitor-monitor

Or ask The Kraken:

@kraken what's running?

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
”I can only initialize enclaves for channel owners”	You are not the Slack channel owner	Transfer channel ownership or ask the owner to run the initialization
enclave not found on deploy	Enclave name or namespace doesn’t match	Run tntc enclave list to see available enclaves
Member not appearing after invite	OIDC sign-in not completed	Ask the member to click the sign-in link The Kraken posted
Tentacle deploy fails with “enclave frozen”	Channel was archived	Unarchive the Slack channel to unfreeze the enclave

Next Steps

• Managing Enclave Members — adding/removing members, transferring ownership, freezing
• Your First Tentacle — building a tentacle from scratch with nodes and tests
• Team Collaboration Concepts — permission presets and the two-layer check