Components

A component in AICR is a registry entry pointing to a Helm chart or Kustomize source that recipes can pull. The catalog lives in recipes/registry.yaml; per-component default values live under recipes/components/<name>/. Overlays bind a component to a cluster shape; bundlers turn that binding into a deployer-specific artifact.

Most components need no Go code. The declarative path is one registry entry plus a values.yaml. The legacy pkg/component/generic.go::ComponentConfig is marked Deprecated — it is unused in production. The live schema is pkg/recipe/components.go::ComponentConfig.

For the recipe data model — overlays, mixins, criteria, merge order — see /aicr/contributor-guide/recipes-overlays-and-mixins. This page is the contributor view for adding or changing components.

Where Does My Change Go?

Helm vs Kustomize

A component declares either helm: or kustomize: — never both. ComponentRegistry.Validate rejects the mixed shape at load.

Kustomize limitations to know up front:

• --set <key>:<path>=<value> flows through Helm value rendering only; Kustomize components silently ignore overrides.
• nodeScheduling.system / accelerated paths target Helm values; they do not apply to Kustomize sources.
• The bundler runs kustomize build at bundle time and wraps the output as templates/manifest.yaml inside the standard local-format folder (see /aicr/contributor-guide/architecture-overview for the classification rule).

Adding a Helm Component

1. Add the registry entry to recipes/registry.yaml:

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- name: my-operator
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  displayName: My Operator
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  valueOverrideKeys:
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    - myoperator
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  helm:
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    defaultRepository: https://charts.example.com
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    defaultChart: example/my-operator
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    defaultVersion: v1.0.0
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    defaultNamespace: my-operator
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  nodeScheduling:
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    system:
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      nodeSelectorPaths: [operator.nodeSelector]
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      tolerationPaths:   [operator.tolerations]

2. Create recipes/components/my-operator/values.yaml with the chart defaults you want every recipe to start from. Keep this file minimal and widely applicable — cluster-specific tweaks belong in values-<context>.yaml siblings referenced from an overlay.

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# fullnameOverride avoids the aicr-stack- prefix on resource names.
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fullnameOverride: my-operator
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operator:
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  replicas: 1

3. Optional blocks on the registry entry:

• validations: — bundle-time misconfiguration warnings (/aicr/contributor-guide/validators)
• healthCheck.assertFile: — chainsaw conformance assertions (/aicr/contributor-guide/validators)
• manifestFiles: — manifest YAMLs (paths relative to the recipes data root) bundled with the component whenever a recipe references it and the componentRef declares none; shipped in the injected -post local chart after the main release. Ref-declared lists take precedence.
• storageClassPaths: — where --storage-class is injected
• sharedStorageClassPaths: — where --shared-storage-class is injected
• podScheduling.workload.workloadSelectorPaths — for workload-pod placement
• gkeCriticalPriority, hasSelfRefCRDs, manifestsUseChartCRDs — narrow service-specific quirks (see godoc on ComponentConfig for when these apply)

4. Run make bom-docs and commit the regenerated docs/user/container-images.md in the same PR. CLAUDE.md treats this as a hard rule whenever you change registry.yaml, a component’s values.yaml, or any chart version pin. See BOM regeneration.

5. Run make qualify — covers tests, lint, and the recipe-resolution suite that parses every registry entry.

Adding a Kustomize Component

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- name: my-kustomize-app
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  displayName: My Kustomize App
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  valueOverrideKeys:
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    - mykustomize
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  kustomize:
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    defaultSource: https://github.com/example/my-app
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    defaultPath: deploy/production
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    defaultTag: v1.0.0

No recipes/components/<name>/values.yaml is required — Kustomize reads its inputs from the upstream source. Reminder: no --set overrides, and nodeScheduling paths do not apply.

Schema Reference

Authoritative definitions live in pkg/recipe/components.go. One-liner per field:

nodeScheduling.system vs accelerated

This is the field most contributors get wrong on first PR.

• system — paths into chart values for workloads that must land on management / control-plane nodes (e.g., operators, controllers, webhooks). The bundler writes the --system-node-selector and --system-node-toleration values here.
• accelerated — paths into chart values for workloads that must land on GPU nodes (e.g., device-plugin DaemonSets, driver-validation, DCGM exporters). The bundler writes the --accelerated-node-selector and --accelerated-node-toleration values here.

Concrete example from gpu-operator:

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nodeScheduling:
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  system:
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    nodeSelectorPaths:
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      - operator.nodeSelector
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      - node-feature-discovery.master.nodeSelector
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    tolerationPaths:
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      - operator.tolerations
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  accelerated:
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    nodeSelectorPaths:
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      - daemonsets.nodeSelector
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      - node-feature-discovery.worker.nodeSelector
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    tolerationPaths:
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      - daemonsets.tolerations

Wrong column = workloads land on the wrong node class. A DaemonSet placed under system will miss GPU nodes; an operator under accelerated will refuse to schedule on a cluster with tainted GPU nodes only.

valueOverrideKeys

--set <key>:<path>=<value> matches via GetByOverrideKey:

1. The component name is checked first.
2. Each entry in valueOverrideKeys is then checked.

For gpu-operator with valueOverrideKeys: [gpuoperator], both --set gpu-operator:driver.version=... and --set gpuoperator:driver.version=... resolve to the same component. Pick a key that is easier to type (no hyphens) and document it in the displayName-adjacent comments if non-obvious. Override keys are globally unique — ComponentRegistry.Validate rejects duplicates.

Exposing Scheduling Knobs Without New Flags

A recurring first-PR instinct is to add a new CLI flag for every placement knob a chart exposes — one flag for the controller, one for the workers, one for a sidecar, and so on. Don’t. AICR already models node placement as value paths, not flags, so the existing primitives cover arbitrary chart depth without growing the CLI surface.

Two separate mechanisms are at work — keep them distinct:

Path routing. nodeScheduling is registry metadata that maps chart value paths onto the system / accelerated node classes (see the section above). It selects which chart paths receive a node selector / toleration; it does not participate in value precedence. The bundler fans --system-node-selector / --accelerated-node-selector (and the matching *-toleration flags) out to every declared path, so one flag covers N workloads.

Value precedence. Once a path is targeted, its value is resolved across layers, lowest precedence first:

1. Component value defaults — ship sane defaults in recipes/components/<name>/values.yaml, or per-recipe in an overlay componentRefs[].valuesFile / inline overrides. This is where the common case (e.g. a managed cluster’s standard node labels) works out of the box with no flags at all.
2. Deploy-time overrides — --set <key>:<path>=<value> reaches any value path for last-mile deviations; --dynamic <key>:<path> defers a path to install time (it is stripped from values.yaml into cluster-values.yaml for the operator to fill in).

Merge order is base → valuesFile → overlay overrides → --set / --dynamic, so a bundle-time override always wins over a recipe default. The node-class flags (--system-node-selector et al.) write into their routed paths at bundle time, alongside --set.

Deciding where a knob belongs:

“When omitted, inherit from the node class” needs no special logic — a path listed under system / accelerated is the inheritance.

Caveat: the chart must actually render the path. A nodeSelector path only takes effect if the upstream chart template renders it. Some charts honor only affinity / tolerations and silently drop nodeSelector, so a declared path becomes a no-op. Verify against the chart’s templates before adding a path. If the chart does not support it, either pin placement through the affinity path the chart does render (as a values.yaml default) or omit the path and document the limitation in a registry comment. The slinky-slurm-operator entry in registry.yaml is a worked example of the latter.

deploymentOrder

RecipeResult.DeploymentOrder is derived, not authored. TopologicalSort in pkg/recipe/metadata_store.go orders components by componentRefs[].dependencyRefs declared in the overlay. When no dependencies are declared, the order falls back to the order in which components are listed in the overlay’s componentRefs. Express ordering by declaring dependencyRefs on the dependent component, not by writing a separate deploymentOrder block.

Local Format and Bundle Classification

The bundler emits a uniform NNN-<component>/ layout via pkg/bundler/deployer/localformat. Classification (single source of truth in localformat.classify):

If both helm and kustomize fields are populated, Validate rejects the registry entry — there is no precedence rule because the shape is invalid. manifestFiles are added post-chart; preManifestFiles ship at sync-wave N-1 (e.g., a Namespace with PSS labels the chart pods depend on).

Deployers

AICR ships five output adapters in pkg/bundler/deployer/: helm, helmfile, argocd, argocd-helm, flux. Each calls localformat.Write() and then layers its own orchestration files (deploy.sh, helmfile.yaml, Argo Application CRs, Flux HelmReleases). Components do not need to be deployer-aware — the bundler renders per-deployer from one component definition.

Deployment ordering

One model, three projections. Every deployer derives ordering from the same source: each component’s declared dependencyRefs. What differs is how faithfully a deployer’s native mechanism can express that dependency graph. For the concurrent deployers, components with no path between them are independent and roll out concurrently, while a real dependency gates (the dependent waits for its dependency to be healthy). The NNN-<name>/ folder numbers reflect DeploymentOrder (a topological serialization) for readability, and drive the two deliberately linear paths — the helm deploy.sh and --serial mode — which install strictly in that order regardless of tiers.

pkg/recipe exposes the graph two ways, and deployers pick whichever fits their mechanism:

• TopologicalSort → a flat DeploymentOrder (one valid serialization).
• ComponentRefsTopologicalLevels → dependency-depth tiers, where a tier holds exactly the components whose dependencies are all satisfied by earlier tiers (so a tier’s members are mutually independent).

flux — the exact DAG. Flux’s dependsOn is a native dependency graph, so the flux deployer projects each component’s declared dependencyRefs directly onto it: a HelmRelease’s dependsOn names exactly its dependencies’ terminal releases, nothing more. This is the most faithful and most parallel rendering — a component waits only for what it actually needs — and it reads naturally to flux users because dependsOn mirrors dependencyRefs one-for-one. See declaredDependsOn.

argocd / argocd-helm — tiers as sync-wave bands. Argo CD’s sync-wave is a single integer per Application. Applications sharing a wave sync together, and Argo advances to a higher wave only once the current one is healthy — ordered bands, a partial order rather than a total one. Because a component gets one integer, it cannot express “wait for A but not B” when A and B sit at the same depth, so the DAG is approximated by tiers: wave = tier*4 + phase, where the per-component phase orders -pre → primary → -post → -readiness. The stride-4 band width keeps consecutive tiers disjoint, so a tier’s readiness gate still blocks the next tier. The cost of the coarser banding is mild over-constraint (a component waits for its whole prior tier, not just its own dependencies). See waveForFolder.

helmfile — tiers as sequential sub-helmfiles. Emits one level-N.yaml sub-helmfile per tier, processed in sequence so each tier’s CRDs land in the cluster’s REST mapper before the next tier’s plan is rendered (issue #914). Within a sub-helmfile, needs: edges chain only a component’s own -pre → primary → -post releases; independent components in the tier carry no edge, so helmfile applies them concurrently. Cross-tier ordering is the sub-helmfile sequence, not per-release needs: — the same tier approximation as argocd. See buildHelmfile.

helm — deliberately serial. The deploy.sh installs one component at a time in DeploymentOrder, trading parallelism for the simplest possible shell. The readiness gates already sequence it correctly.

Disabling parallelism (--serial)

aicr bundle --serial forces every deployer to install components strictly one at a time in DeploymentOrder, an escape hatch for reproducing the pre-parallelism ordering or bisecting a misbehaving rollout. It affects the four concurrent deployers: argocd and argocd-helm fall back to a linear sync-wave per folder, flux chains each HelmRelease dependsOn to the previous component instead of projecting the DAG, and helmfile chains every release to its predecessor via needs: (one linear apply chain) instead of only within a component. The helm deploy.sh is already serial, so the flag is a no-op for it. Off by default.

See /aicr/contributor-guide/architecture-overview for the deployer matrix.

BOM Regeneration

docs/user/container-images.md is rendered fresh from each Helm chart’s actual templates by make bom-docs. Run it and commit the regenerated file in the same PR whenever you:

• Add or remove a component
• Bump a chart version (in registry.yaml, an overlay, or a mixin)
• Change a values.yaml in a way that affects which images render (image-repo override, subchart enable/disable, etc.)

The BOM’s version column and component set are gated at PR time (TestCommittedBOMVersionsMatchRegistry plus the bom-freshness merge-gate job), so a missed regen after a version or component-set change fails CI. Not gated at PR time is rendered-image drift — a chart pulling a new image with no pin change on our side; make bom-check (a full re-render comparison) is its opt-in blocking check, and the weekly BOM-refresh workflow auto-detects it and opens a PR. Still run make bom-docs locally on any chart-touching change.

Boundary: Components Are Metadata

A component entry describes what to deploy and where its values land. Components do not carry apply, wait, uninstall, rollback, or readiness-polling logic — those concerns belong to the deployer that consumes the bundle. If you find yourself writing custom apply code inside the bundler or under pkg/component/, you are on the wrong side of the boundary — see /aicr/contributor-guide/architecture-overview “What AICR Is Not”.

See Also

• /aicr/contributor-guide/recipes-overlays-and-mixins — overlays, mixins, criteria, the recipe data model
• /aicr/contributor-guide/validators — bundle-time component validation checks
• /aicr/contributor-guide/validators — chainsaw health checks and validator runner
• /aicr/contributor-guide/architecture-overview — contributor index and architectural boundary
• integrator/recipe-development.md — end-user recipe authoring
• user/component-catalog.md — end-user component catalog
• pkg/recipe/components.go — ComponentConfig source of truth
• recipes/registry.yaml — live component catalog