Installation

This page is a quick-start for standing up an Orchestra instance. For a local evaluation cluster, follow the local path. For a real deployment, the Helm and cloud guides under Deployment are the source of truth — this page just orients you.

Prerequisites

• A Kubernetes cluster (Docker Desktop’s built-in cluster is fine for local eval; GKE/EKS/etc. for production).
• kubectl and helm on your PATH.
• An ingress controller (Orchestra is tested with Traefik) and, for real domains, cert-manager for TLS.
• A Google OAuth client for login (see oauth2-proxy Setup).

Hostnames

Orchestra is not tied to orchestraplatform.org — that’s just the reference deployment. You pick your own base domain with a single value:

--set global.domain=orchestra.example.edu

Everything derives from it: app.<domain> (dashboard), api.<domain> (API), and *.<domain> (one subdomain per workshop session). Two things must be set to match your domain, since they aren’t auto-derived:

• the oauth2-proxy redirect-url / cookie-domain / whitelist-domain values, and
• the Google OAuth console authorized redirect URI: https://app.<domain>/oauth2/callback.

Note

The app. and api. prefixes are fixed by the chart templates — you configure the base domain, not the individual subdomain names.

Local (evaluation)

The repo’s justfile wraps the local setup against Docker Desktop’s Kubernetes.

1. Install toolchains and dependencies:

   just setup

2. Prepare the local cluster (switches to the docker-desktop context, installs Traefik, applies the Orchestra CRDs, seeds .env files):

   just dev-setup

3. Run the stack (API, frontend, operator) — see Local Development for details:

   just dev

Workshop sessions are reachable at http://<name>.127.0.0.1.nip.io:30080 (nip.io resolves to localhost — no DNS setup needed).

Production (Helm)

Apply the CRDs, then install the chart. The CRDs ship as a separate chart so the Workshop CRD is registered before the operator starts.

# 1. CRDs first
kubectl apply -f deploy/charts/orchestra-crds/templates/

# 2. Install/upgrade the platform
helm upgrade --install orchestra ./deploy/charts/orchestra \
  -n orchestra-system --create-namespace \
  -f deploy/charts/orchestra/values.yaml \
  -f your-values.yaml

Note

The chart runs database migrations automatically as a Helm pre-install,pre-upgrade hook, so they apply in the right order on both fresh installs and upgrades.

See the Helm Chart guide for the full values reference, Ingress Controller for routing and wildcard TLS, and GCP Autopilot for an end-to-end cloud walkthrough.

Next steps

• Configuring Workshop Images — make any container image run as a workshop.
• Platform Overview — how the pieces fit together.