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Rancher Desktop

Rancher Desktop is an open-source project that brings Kubernetes and container management to the desktop. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. This README pertains to the development of Rancher Desktop. For user-oriented information about Rancher Desktop, please see rancherdesktop.io. For user-oriented documentation, please see docs.rancherdesktop.io.

Overview

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

Setup

Windows

There are two options for building from source on Windows: with a Development VM Setup or Manual Development Environment Setup with an existing Windows installation.

Development VM Setup

  1. Download a Microsoft Windows 10 development virtual machine. All of the following steps should be done in that virtual machine.

  2. Open a PowerShell prompt (hit Windows Key + X and open Windows PowerShell).

  3. Run the automated setup script:

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

  4. Close the privileged PowerShell prompt.

  5. Ensure msbuild_path and msvs_version are configured correctly in .npmrc file. Run the following commands to set these properties:

    npm config set msvs_version <visual-studio-version-number>
npm config set msbuild_path <path/to/MSBuild.exe>

You can now clone the repository and run npm install.

Manual Development Environment Setup

  1. Install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on your machine. Skip this step, if WSL is already installed.

  2. Open a PowerShell prompt (hit Windows Key + X and open Windows PowerShell).

  3. Install Scoop via iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex.

  4. Install git, go, nvm, and unzip via scoop install git go nvm python unzip. Check node version with nvm list. If node v16 is not installed or set as the current version, then install using nvm install 16 and set as current using nvm use 16.xx.xx.

  5. Install Visual Studio 2017 or higher. Make sure you have the Windows SDK component installed. This Visual Studio docs describes steps to install components.

  6. Ensure msbuild_path and msvs_version are configured correctly in .npmrc file. Run the following commands to set these properties:

    npm config set msvs_version <visual-studio-version-number>
npm config set msbuild_path <path/to/MSBuild.exe>

You can now clone the repository and run npm install.

macOS

Install Node.js v16 and Go, for example via Homebrew:

brew install node@16
brew link node@16
brew install go

Then you can install dependencies with:

npm install

Linux

Ensure you have the following installed:

  • Node.js v16. Make sure you have any development packages installed. For example, on openSUSE Leap 15.3 you would need to install nodejs16 and nodejs16-devel.

  • Go 1.18 or later.

  • Dependencies described in the node-gyp docs installation. This is required to install the ffi-napi npm package. These docs mention "a proper C/C++ compiler toolchain". You can install gcc and g++ for this.

Then you can install dependencies with:

npm install

You can then run Rancher Desktop as described below. It may fail on the first run - if this happens, try doing a factory reset and re-running, which has been known to solve this issue.

Running

Once you have your dependencies installed you can run a development version of Rancher Desktop with:

npm run dev

Tests

To run the unit tests:

npm test

To run the integration tests:

npm run test:e2e

Building

Rancher can be built from source on Windows, macOS or Linux. Cross-compilation is currently not supported. To run a build do:

npm run build

The build output goes to dist/.

Development Builds

Windows and macOS

Each commit triggers a GitHub Actions run that results in application bundles (.exes and .dmgs) being uploaded as artifacts. This can be useful if you want to test the latest build of Rancher Desktop as built by the build system. You can download these artifacts from the Summary page of completed package actions.

Linux

Similar to Windows and macOS, Linux builds of Rancher Desktop are made from each commit. However on Linux, only part of the process is done by GitHub Actions. The final part of it is done by Open Build Service.

There are two channels of the Rancher Desktop repositories: dev and stable. stable is the channel that most users use. It is the one that users are instructed to add in the official documentation, and the one that contains builds that are created from official releases. dev is the channel that we are interested in here: it contains builds created from the latest commit made on the main branch, and on any branches that match the format release-*. To learn how to install the development repositories, see below.

When using the dev repositories, it is important to understand the format of the versions of Rancher Desktop available from the dev repositories. The versions are in the format:

<priority>.<branch>.<commit_time>.<commit>

where:

priority is a meaningless number that exists to give versions built from the main branch priority over versions built from the release-* branches when updating.

branch is the branch name; dashes are removed due to constraints imposed by package formats.

commit_time is the UNIX timestamp of the commit used to make the build.

commit is the shortened hash of the commit used to make the build.

.deb Development Repository

You can add the repo with the following steps:

curl -s https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/Rancher:/dev/deb/Release.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo dd status=none of=/usr/share/keyrings/isv-rancher-dev-archive-keyring.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/isv-rancher-dev-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/Rancher:/dev/deb/ ./' | sudo dd status=none of=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/isv-rancher-dev.list
sudo apt update

You can see available versions with:

apt list -a rancher-desktop

Once you find the version you want to install you can install it with:

sudo apt install rancher-desktop=<version>

This works even if you already have a version of Rancher Desktop installed.

.rpm Development Repository

You can add the repo with:

sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/Rancher:/dev/rpm/isv:Rancher:dev.repo
sudo zypper refresh

You can see available versions with:

zypper search -s rancher-desktop

Finally, install the version you want with:

zypper install --oldpackage rancher-desktop=<version>

This works even if you already have a version of Rancher Desktop installed.

Development AppImages

There are no repositories for AppImages, but you can access the latest development AppImage builds here.

Contributing

Please see the document about contributing.

Further Reading

Please see the docs directory for further developer documentation.