Developer Guide

Local development, CLI reference, and extending ark-operator with custom LLM providers and task queue backends.

How to develop with and extend ark-operator — iterate locally without a cluster, use the CLI, and plug in custom LLM providers or task queue backends.

Install the CLI

go install (recommended)

Requires Go 1.26 or later.

go install github.com/arkonis-dev/ark-operator/cmd/ark@latest

Verify:

ark --version
# ark v0.11.1 (go1.26)

Binary download

Pre-built binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows are attached to each GitHub release:

# macOS (Apple Silicon)
curl -L https://github.com/arkonis-dev/ark-operator/releases/latest/download/ark-darwin-arm64 \
  -o ark && chmod +x ark && sudo mv ark /usr/local/bin/ark

# macOS (Intel)
curl -L https://github.com/arkonis-dev/ark-operator/releases/latest/download/ark-darwin-amd64 \
  -o ark && chmod +x ark && sudo mv ark /usr/local/bin/ark

# Linux (amd64)
curl -L https://github.com/arkonis-dev/ark-operator/releases/latest/download/ark-linux-amd64 \
  -o ark && chmod +x ark && sudo mv ark /usr/local/bin/ark

Windows: download ark-windows-amd64.exe from the releases page, rename to ark.exe, and add to PATH.

ark run supports pipeline mode (spec.pipeline set). Dynamic delegation mode requires a live cluster with agent pods and Redis queues.

Extending ark-operator

Page	Description
Custom LLM Providers	Implement the `LLMProvider` interface to use any model API
Custom Task Queue Backends	Implement `TaskQueue` / `StreamChannel` for NATS, SQS, Kafka, or any broker