Rancher Desktop 1.9.0 Tech Preview

This is the 1.9.0-tech-preview release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to macOS, Windows, and Linux.

⚠️	Being a tech preview, this release will not be installed by the auto-update feature; you will have to download and install it manually.

New feature

This release provides a preview of the upcoming support for Docker Desktop Extensions. They can be installed via the UI from a catalog, or via the CLI from any registry.

Implementation of extension support is on-going, and this tech preview comes with a catalog of 3 extensions that are known to work with the support already in place:

• Epinio
• Logs-Explorer
• Tachometer

Additional extensions can be installed via rdctl extension install ..., but may possibly not work (yet).

Please use the moby container engine to try out the extensions; "Logs Explorer" and "Tachometer" currently do not work with containerd.

The Epinio extension only works when Kubernetes has been enabled.

Windows and macOS Installers

• Windows
• macOS x86_64
• macOS aarch64

Linux Installation

Because this is not a full release, it cannot be installed as described in the official Rancher Desktop documentation. Instead, follow the developer documentation (scroll past the explanation of version format). This will let you install a development version of Rancher Desktop that has the features associated with the technical preview.

Since the technical preview changes are in the release-1.9 branch, you need to install a version of Rancher Desktop that has release1.9 in it. For example, if installing via rpm, you would use a version that looks like 0.release1.9.1681519864.1234567-7.1.

Important bug fix

Fixes an issue that was introduced in 1.8 in Rancher Desktop Agent, where If Kubernetes sends updates for services and the port mappings had not changed, the existing maps are deleted.

Other changes

There are no other new features in this release (compared to 1.8.1).

The default window size of the application has been increased.

There are some bug fixes related to deployment profiles and the first-run dialog.

Updates to bundled utilities

• helm 3.11.2 → 3.11.3
• docker 23.0.1 → 23.0.3
• docker-compose 2.16.0 → 2.17.2
• nerdctl 1.2.1 → 1.3.0
• trivy 0.38.2 → 0.39.1

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.8.1, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.9.0-tech-preview milestone.