Rancher

As of Rancher v2.5, Rancher can be installed on any Kubernetes cluster.

• RKE
• K3s on Raspberry Pi 4 cluster
• RKE2
• Amazon EKS

Installing Rancher via Helm3

1. Add the Rancher Helm chart repo

helm repo add rancher-latest https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/latest

Create a Namespace for Rancher resources

Rancher documentation states that this namespace should always be called cattle-system

kubectl create namespace cattle-system

Install cert-manager

Rancher supports multiple SSL/TLS termination methods. As the laboratory cluster is on the local network and only accepting connections from the LAN, the following set of instructions will configure Rancher to generate its own certificates. Using Let’s Encyprt and forwarding traffic from an external layer 7 load balancer are better options for production.

Install the CustomResourceDefinition separately

More info on CustomResourceDefinition

kubectl apply --validate=false -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.0.4/cert-manager.crds.yaml

Create the namespace for cert-manager

kubectl create namespace cert-manager

Add the Jetstack Helm repository

helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io

Update your local Helm chart repository cache

helm repo update

Install the cert-manager Helm chart

helm install \
  cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
  --namespace cert-manager \
  --version v1.0.4

Verify Deployment

kubectl get pods --namespace cert-manager

Install Rancher via Helm

Set the hostname to the DNS name you will point to your load balancer.

helm install rancher rancher-latest/rancher \
  --namespace cattle-system \
  --ingress.tls.source=rancher \
  --set hostname=rancher.derekzoladz.com

Confirm deployment of Rancher server

kubectl -n cattle-system rollout status deploy/rancher

Troubleshooting

Ensure the KUBECONFIG environment variable is set

export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml

If Helm can’t reach the k3s cluster

kubectl config view --raw >~/.kube/config