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Prerequisites & requirements

Confirm your host, cluster, and access meet these requirements before installing.

Kubernetes​

Octostar is a Kubernetes-native distribution and runs on any conformant cluster:

  • Managed: EKS, AKS, GKE
  • Self-managed / on-prem: RKE2 / Rancher, OpenShift, and any conformant Kubernetes cluster
  • Local (light testing only): Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop

⚠️ Production requirement — For production, Octostar must be installed on an appropriately scoped (in terms of CPU, memory, and storage — see Resources), highly available and redundant Kubernetes cluster: multiple worker nodes, a replicated control plane, and redundant persistent storage. Single-node Docker Desktop / Rancher Desktop environments are suitable for labs and light testing only — not for production or performance evaluation.

You install against an existing cluster, referenced by its kube context. List your contexts with:

kubectl config get-contexts

Required tools​

The installer can bootstrap these for you with --install-tools, or you can install them yourself:

  • bc, kubectl, helm, helmfile
  • yq, python3 (required by the configuration and air-gap helpers)
  • git

Optional debugging utilities (via --install-utils): k9s, stern.

Resources​

Minimum resources for an Octostar deployment:

ResourceMinimum
CPU24 cores
Memory96 GB RAM
Storage1 TB NVMe

These are minimums. Production clusters should be scaled above them and spread across multiple nodes for high availability (see Kubernetes).

💡 Tip — Under-provisioning memory is the single most common cause of failed installs.

Access and credentials​

  • Docker Hub token — required to pull Octostar images. Provide it either as the DOCKERHUB_TOKEN environment variable or as dockerHub.token in local-env.yaml. (Not required for air-gapped installs, which use a private registry — see Air-gapped installation.)
  • API keys (optional) — for AI/ML and enrichment features: AssemblyAI, OpenAI, Espysys, SocialGist, SocialLinks. Configure in local-env.yaml.
  • Permissions — the installer may need sudo to modify /etc/hosts, and your user must be able to run Docker (sudo usermod -aG docker $USER if needed).

Network (online installs)​

The install host and cluster need outbound access to:

  • Docker Hub (docker.io) and the Octostar OCI registry
  • Upstream Helm chart repositories (Bitnami, Jetstack, Prometheus Community, Grafana, OpenSearch, CNPG, …)

If you cannot meet this, use the air-gapped flow instead.

Air-gapped prerequisites​

In addition to the cluster requirements above, an air-gap install needs:

  • A private container registry reachable from all cluster nodes.
  • A delivery bundle from Octostar for your target release — the image tarball, the full octostar-singlenode repo including a populated charts-offline/ directory, and the client helper scripts. You request this from Octostar; you do not build it yourself.
  • OPA Gatekeeper (shipped in the bundle) for registry rewrites, unless you handle image mirroring another way.

See Air-gapped installation for the full flow.