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: Add Team Members

After the enclave is provisioned, invite people to the Slack channel:

/invite @bob @carol

Joining the channel makes them visitors. To grant full access, the enclave owner adds them as members:

@kraken add @bob
@kraken add @carol

The Kraken resolves each user’s Slack email, confirms their OIDC identity, and registers them as enclave members.

To verify the current member list:

@kraken members

Or via CLI:

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	Owner has not added them yet	Run @kraken add @user to add them as a member
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