If needed, detailed set-up is explained on the Kali Training website. Create a new virtual machine setting the OS to the latest Debian 64-bit and allocating a 20 GB hard disk. With our mini.iso, we can now begin to build our virtual machine. If not, head to the gtk/ directory and grab the mini.iso in there, which will start a graphical installer. If you are comfortable with a text installation, grab the mini.iso in this directory.

Having a GUI running on a headless system is also a waste of resources so while we could uninstall it or disable it, we’ll install the virtual machine using a netboot ISO. Get the netboot ISOīy default, the Kali Linux ISOs on the download page have a desktop environment installed, and while we could use it to build a virtual machine, we want to minimize the amount of data we have to upload to DigitalOcean for reasons we will talk about later. Instead, we’ll build a lightweight Kali installation with the bare minimum to get it working. While it might be possible to load the official Kali Linux virtual images, it wouldn’t be very efficient. This is perfect for us as we can use our own version of Kali Linux in their cloud. A little while ago, they added support for custom images, which allows users to import virtual machine disks and use them as droplets. However, one feature in particular sets them apart them from their competitors.

Similar to AWS, DigitalOcean has datacenters around the world and sometimes multiple datacenters in each country. They offer instances, called “droplets”, with different Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc.

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider similar to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and many others.

Kali linux on docker