[BUG] Installing kagent doesn't work at all

[sawnjordan]

📋 Prerequisites

• I have searched the existing issues to avoid creating a duplicate
• By submitting this issue, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct
• I am using the latest version of the software
• I have tried to clear cache/cookies or used incognito mode (if ui-related)
• I can consistently reproduce this issue

🎯 Affected Service(s)

Not Sure

🚦 Impact/Severity

Blocker

🐛 Bug Description

I’m following the Kagent Quickstart Guide, and although all prerequisites are met (kind, helm, kubectl installed), I’m facing several issues during installation and setup.

Steps to Reproduce

• Followed the installation steps as mentioned in the documentation.

• On the first installation, everything seemed to work, but:

• The Kagent dashboard didn’t load initially and required a manual port-forward to access the UI.

• After accessing the UI, the agent status was showing "Not Ready".

• Running kubectl get nodes -A | grep agent caused the terminal to hang.

• Eventually, even kubectl get nodes stopped responding.

• My CPU and memory usage spiked significantly during this process.

• After restarting the system, kubectl get nodes started working again.

Additional Observations

The kagent namespace was not created automatically — the installation deployed everything into the default namespace.

• I manually deleted the resources from the default namespace and created the kagent namespace.

• After that, when I tried to run kagent install again, I received errors (details below).

• I’m running this setup on a high-spec laptop (Intel i7 12th Gen P-series processor), so it doesn’t seem to be a resource limitation issue.

Problem

I’m currently stuck — unable to proceed with installation due to these repeated failures and the missing namespace behavior.

🔄 Steps To Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce

Followed the installation steps as mentioned in the documentation.

• On the first installation, everything seemed to work, but:

• The Kagent dashboard didn’t load initially and required a manual port-forward to access the UI.

• After accessing the UI, the agent status was showing "Not Ready".

• Running kubectl get nodes -A | grep agent caused the terminal to hang.

• Eventually, even kubectl get nodes stopped responding.

• My CPU and memory usage spiked significantly during this process.

• After restarting the system, kubectl get nodes started working again.

🤔 Expected Behavior

No response

📱 Actual Behavior

No response

💻 Environment

No response

🔧 CLI Bug Report

No response

🔍 Additional Context

No response

📋 Logs

📷 Screenshots

No response

🙋 Are you willing to contribute?

• I am willing to submit a PR to fix this issue

[peterj]

can you make sure that your network connection is ok? the context deadline exceeded error might be an issue with pulling the docker images. this could also explain the previous issues where the agents show up as Not ready.

[sawnjordan]

@peterj, Yes I can assure that the network connection is ok but after running kagent install command my terminal freezes and below commands doesn't work at all.
kubectl get nodes, docker ps, kind get clusters

[awickham10]

I ran into the same issue. It appears the kagent-controller and kagent-ui deployments use a container registry of cr.kagent.dev but they can't be pulled from there.

I was able to get things running by overriding the registry with ghcr.io.

helm upgrade kagent oci://ghcr.io/kagent-dev/kagent/helm/kagent --namespace kagent --set registry=ghcr.io