Install the operator

This guide installs media-operator on a liken cluster. At the end, the operator and its message bus run in liken-system, and the cluster accepts the five resources: Player, Play, Remote, Keymap, and MediaPreferences.

You need:

• A liken cluster.
• The hardware operators for the devices your players will select: the display-operator for a screen, the audio-operator for sound, and the bluetooth-operator for controllers and Bluetooth speakers. Install the ones your equipment has; a Player can only select what an installed operator publishes.
• kubectl with cluster-admin access, because the install creates the CRDs and a ClusterRole.

The device classes are yours

The base ships no DeviceClass. The operator claims no devices for itself, and the classes a Player names are the cluster owner’s vocabulary, the same classes a hand-written ResourceClaim would use. Each hardware operator’s manual gives the YAML for its class: displays, audio outputs, and Bluetooth devices.

Apply the manifests

This site serves the repository’s deploy/ directory as raw YAML, so the install needs no clone:

kubectl apply -n liken-system \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/players-crd.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/plays-crd.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/remotes-crd.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/keymaps-crd.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/mediapreferences-crd.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/rbac.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/operator.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/bus.yaml

The -n flag places the ServiceAccount, the two Deployments, and the Service in liken-system, the namespace every liken cluster has. The CRDs and the ClusterRole are cluster-scoped, so the flag does not apply to them.

For GitOps, point a Kustomization at the served URLs. kustomize takes a raw YAML URL as a resource:

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
namespace: liken-system
resources:
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/players-crd.yaml
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/plays-crd.yaml
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/remotes-crd.yaml
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/keymaps-crd.yaml
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/mediapreferences-crd.yaml
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/rbac.yaml
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/operator.yaml
  - https://media.liken.sh/deploy/bus.yaml

A clone works too: kubectl apply -k deploy/ from the repository applies the same files through deploy/kustomization.yaml.

What the install runs

The install runs two Deployments in liken-system, and they are separate on purpose:

• media-operator watches the five resources and reconciles them into claims and pods. It holds no volume and serves no HTTP; on every pass it re-derives everything from the API server, and it reads each playback pod’s report from the bus.
• bus is one Mosquitto broker, with a Service at bus.liken-system.svc:1883. The broker is not inside the operator’s pod, so the operator restarts without dropping a message, and a button press reaches mpv while the operator is down.

Watch it start

kubectl -n liken-system get pods

Both pods report Running. The operator’s first log line counts what it found:

kubectl -n liken-system logs deploy/media-operator
media.liken.sh: operating 0 plays and 0 remotes over bus.liken-system.svc:1883

From here, the work is declaring resources. The reference describes each one, and the message bus describes every topic the pods and your own programs share.

Remove the operator

Deleting a Play stops its run, and deleting a Player or a Remote removes its pods and claims, through the ownerReference every one of them carries. To remove the operator itself:

kubectl delete -n liken-system \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/rbac.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/operator.yaml \
  -f https://media.liken.sh/deploy/bus.yaml

Deleting a CRD deletes every resource of that kind. Delete the five *-crd.yaml files only when every player, play, remote, keymap, and preference in the cluster can be deleted with them.