Code-based provider quick start

This quickstart is for cases where your provider ships its own controller (operator), CRDs, and optionally a custom UI microfrontend. It is the companion to the No-code provider quick start, which uses api-syncagent to expose an existing CRD with no provider-specific code.

The reference implementation is the Wild West provider, which exposes a Cowboys API under the wildwest.platform-mesh.io group. The full walkthrough lives next to the code, in the provider-quickstart repository — we keep it there rather than duplicating it here so the steps stay in sync with the code, charts, and make targets you actually run.

Requires a local clone

Unlike the no-code quickstart, this one builds and runs code from the provider-quickstart repo. Clone it first — every step in the upstream guide is executed from inside that directory:

git clone https://github.com/platform-mesh/provider-quickstart.git
cd provider-quickstart

Follow the walkthrough

Run through the upstream guide end-to-end:

→ provider-quickstart: Usage

It covers:

1. Setting the admin and compute kubeconfigs.
2. Creating the provider workspace hierarchy (root:providers:quickstart).
3. Bootstrapping provider resources (make init) — applies the APIExport, APIResourceSchema, ProviderMetadata, ContentConfiguration, and RBAC.
4. Building and loading container images into the local kind cluster.
5. Deploying the wild-west controller, armament-sync syncer, and portal microfrontend.
6. Trying it out — creating Cowboy resources with secret refs and using the Armament catalog (a kcp CachedResource) from a consumer workspace.
7. Debugging via the marketplace and contentconfigurations virtual workspaces.

Prerequisites

• A local Platform Mesh setup from Set up Platform Mesh locally.
• A local clone of provider-quickstart (see the tip above).
• kubectl with the kubectl-kcp plugin, Helm 3, Go, and make.

Admin kubeconfig required

Providers live in a dedicated workspace tree, so you need the admin kubeconfig to create the provider workspace and bootstrap resources. Regular user kubeconfigs will not have the required permissions today.

How it relates to Platform Mesh concepts

The four building blocks the upstream walkthrough exercises are documented here:

Building block	Reference
APIExport / APIResourceSchema	API sharing
ProviderMetadata (Marketplace registration)	Marketplace
ContentConfiguration (portal UI)	ContentConfiguration
CachedResource (read-only catalogs to consumers)	Virtual workspaces

Next

• Use the provider-quickstart repo as a template — fork it, replace wildwest.platform-mesh.io with your API group, define your CRD schema, and update ProviderMetadata and ContentConfiguration.
• Continue with Consume a service from a controller to write the consumer side.