Rancher Desktop

Rancher Desktop is an open-source project to bring Kubernetes and container management to the desktop. Windows and macOS versions of Rancher Desktop are available for download.

Features

Rancher Desktop provides the following features in the form of a desktop application:

• The version of Kubernetes you choose
• Ability to test upgrading Kubernetes to a new version and see how your workloads respond
• Build, push, and pull images (powered by KIM)
• Expose an application in Kubernetes for local access

All of this is wrapped in an open-source application.

Get The App

You can download the application for macOS and Windows on the releases page.

Running on Windows requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Please install WSL prior to installing Rancher Desktop. In a future release Rancher Desktop will automate the step for you.

Note, development builds are available from the CI system. Development builds are not signed.

Base Design Details

Rancher Desktop is an electron application with the primary business logic being written in TypeScript and JavaScript. It leverages several other pieces of technology to provide the platform elements which include k3s, kim, kubectl, wsl, hyperkit, and more. The application wraps numerous pieces of technology to provide one cohesive application.

Building The Source

Rancher can be built from source on macOS or Windows. The following provides some detail on building.

Prerequisites

Rancher Desktop is an electron and node.js application. node.js v14 needs to be installed to build the source.

The following is a breakdown of the pre-requisites for each platform. These need to be installed first.

macOS:

brew install pkg-config cairo pango libpng jpeg giflib librsvg

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install -y libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libgif-dev librsvg2-dev

Windows

1. Download a Microsoft Windows 10 development virtual machine.
2. Open a privileged PowerShell prompt (hit Windows Key + X and open Windows PowerShell (Admin)).
3. Run the automated setup script:

   Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
   
   iwr -useb 'https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rd/raw/main/scripts/windows-setup.ps1' | iex
   

4. Close the privileged PowerShell prompt.

You are now ready to clone the repository and run npm install.

Manual Development Environment Setup

1. Download and install Visual Studio, taking care to install:
   • MSVC v141 - VS 2017 C++ x64/x86 build tools (v14.16)
   • MSVC v142 - VS 2019 C++ x64/x86 build tools (Latest)
2. Download the GTK+ Win64 bundle; it is recommended to install it in the default location at C:\GTK.
3. Download the libjpeg-turbo development files; it is recommended to install it in the default location at C:\libjpeg-turbo64.
4. Install git, Python 2.x, and NodeJS.
   1. Install Scoop via iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex
   2. Install git and nvm via scoop install git nvm
   3. Add the old versions bucket via scoop bucket add versions
   4. Install nvm and Python 2 via scoop install python27
   5. Install NodeJS via nvm install 14.17.0
      • Remember to use it by running nvm use 14.17.0
5. Configure NPM to use the version of MSBuild installed:

   npm config set msbuild_path "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe"
   

   Note that this is the default path; the path on your system may differ.

If you have customized the GTK and libjpeg paths, you will need to run npm install with the GYP_DEFINES variable set to point to them. In PowerShell, this would look something like:

$Env:GYP_DEFINES = 'GTK_Root="C:/Path/To/GTK" jpeg_root="C:/Path/To/libjpeg"'

How To Run

Use the following commands. The former is needed the first time or after an update is pulled from upstream. The latter is needed for follow-up starts.

npm install
npm run dev