Installing Rancher

Rancher, the open-source multi-cluster orchestration platform, lets operations teams deploy, manage and secure enterprise Kubernetes.

Choose any Linux distro

Docker is required to be installed on nodes where the Rancher server will be installed with Helm on an RKE cluster or with Docker. Docker is not required for RKE2 or K3s clusters.

There are a couple of options for installing Docker. One option is to refer to the official Docker documentation about how to install Docker on Linux. The steps will vary based on the Linux distribution.

Another option is to use one of Rancher's Docker installation scripts, which are available for most recent versions of Docker.

For example, this command could be used to install Docker 20.10 on Ubuntu:

curl https://releases.rancher.com/install-docker/20.10.sh | sh

Rancher has installation scripts for every version of upstream Docker that Kubernetes supports. To find out whether a script is available for installing a certain Docker version, refer to this GitHub repository, which contains all of Rancher's Docker installation scripts.

Note that the following sysctl setting must be applied:

sudo sysctl net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables=1

Persistent Data

Rancher uses etcd as a datastore. When Rancher is installed with Docker, the embedded etcd is being used. The persistent data is at the following path in the container: /var/lib/rancher.

You can bind mount a host volume to this location to preserve data on the host it is running on:

docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped \
  -p 80:80 -p 443:443 \
  -v /opt/rancher:/var/lib/rancher \
  --privileged \
  rancher/rancher:latest

Privileged access is required.