#Rancher.io

Rancher is an open source project that provides a complete platform for operating Docker in production. It provides infrastructure services such as multi-host networking, global and local load balancing, and volume snapshots. It integrates native Docker management capabilities such as Docker Machine and Docker Swarm. It offers a rich user experience that enables devops admins to operate Docker in production at large scale.

Why?

Developers and operations teams love Docker because it provides a consist computing platform that extends the entire devops life cycle, from laptop, QA, pre-production, to production environment. Rancher additionally implements consistent networking and storage services for Docker containers to operate on any bare-metal servers, VMware clusters, and public/private clouds. By integrating Rancher’s networking and storage services with native Docker management capabilities in an intuitive UI, Rancher offers a complete production platform for Docker.

Installation

Rancher is deployed as a set of Docker containers. Running Rancher is a simple as launching two containers. One container as the management server and another container on a node as an agent. You can install the containers in following approaches.

• Manually
• Vagrant
• Puppet (Thanks @nickschuch)

Requirements

• Docker 1.4.1+
• Ubuntu 14.04 or CoreOS 494+
  • Note: These are the only tested distributions at the moment, but most modern Linux distributions will work

Management Server

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 rancher/server

Register Docker Nodes

docker run --rm -it --privileged -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock rancher/agent http://MANAGEMENT_IP:8080

The UI/API is available on the exposed port 8080.

UI

The UI is available by accessing the base HTTP URL of the management server. For example, http://server:8080

API

The API is available by accessing the /v1 HTTP path of the management server. For example, http://server:8080/v1

Rancher has its own API for infrastructure management tasks. For Docker related operations, the intention is to support the Docker CLI. That work is currently in progress.

Vagrant

If you want to use Vagrant to run this on your laptop just clone the repo and to do vagrant up and then access port 8080 for the UI.

Status

We've just recently kicked off this project. Currently Rancher.io is able to provide a basic implementation of overlay networking and cross-server Docker links. A lot of work has been done to put in a solid orchestration platform to control all the functionality we wish to do. Now that that framework is in place expect this project to produce a high amount of features over the next six months.

Source Code

This repo is a meta-repo used for packaging. The source code for Rancher is in other repos in the rancherio organization. The majority of the code is in https://github.com/rancherio/cattle.

Planned

• Storage
  • Docker volume management (create, delete, list)
  • Volume snapshot
  • Snapshot backup to S3/Object Store
  • Create volume from snapshot
• Networking
  • Security groups
  • Load balancing