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CRD Installer

Destructive Utility

The CRD Installer is a powerful utility intended only for development environments. Depending on its settings, it can overwrite or delete existing CRDs, which may lead to data loss or cluster instability. Never use this in production!

When developing operators, you may want to quickly install or update CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs) in your cluster. The CrdInstaller service automates this process, making it easier to iterate on CRD changes during development. If the Kubernetes API server is temporarily unavailable when the operator starts, the installer logs the error and retries in the background with backoff instead of stopping the host startup.

How to Add the CRD Installer​

To enable the CRD installer, add the following to your operator's Program.cs:

builder.Services
    .AddKubernetesOperator()
#if DEBUG
    .AddCrdInstaller(c => c
        .WithOverwriteExisting()
        .WithDeleteOnShutdown())
#endif
    .RegisterComponents();
  • WithOverwriteExisting(): Existing CRDs with the same name will be overwritten. This is useful for development but can be destructive if used in production, as it may cause data loss.
  • WithDeleteOnShutdown(): All CRDs installed by the operator will be deleted when the operator shuts down. This is extremely destructive and should only be used in disposable development environments.

The CRDs are produced by the ICrdResourceFactory, which can be replaced or extended — see Customizing Resource Generation.