Rancher Desktop 1.9.1

This is the 1.9.1 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Windows and macOS Installers

• Windows
• macOS x86_64
• macOS aarch64
• Linux install notes

Important bug fixes in this patch release

Locked settings could be unlocked

When the main application window was closed and re-opened without terminating the application, then all settings locked by a deployment profile could be edited again. They were only reset to their locked values when Rancher Desktop was restarted.

Uncaught proxy handling errors

The module handling https proxies inside Rancher Desktop was updated to its latest version, which contained a bug tied to handling proxy error messages that contained additional error information in addition to the HTTP status code. This bug would throw an exception that Rancher Desktop would not handle. The module has been downgraded to the previous version again until the bug is fixed upstream.

Other fixes

New networking stack on Windows

• The new networking code would break when the user name contained a space.

• Port forwarding did not work with the new networking code.

Buildkit support on Windows

The Rancher Desktop WSL distro did not include the necessary tools to use buildkit on Windows.

Apple Virtualization Framework could not be enabled on macOS 13.0 (Intel) and 13.3 (M1)

This was due to an incorrect version comparison and has been fixed.

Rancher Desktop failed silently when ~/.docker/config.json was invalid

It now displays an error message during startup.

Known issue

The Kubernetes version can be modified via rdctl start --kubernetes.version 1.XX.Y even when it is otherwise locked down by a deployment profile. This is the only setting affected by this bug; Kubernetes versions are updated later once the list of available versions is known.

Updates to bundled utilities

• helm 3.12.0 → 3.12.1
• docker-buildx 0.10.5 → 0.11.0
• docker-compose 2.18.1 → 2.19.0
• trivy 0.42.0 → 0.42.1

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.9.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.9.1 milestones.

Rancher Desktop 1.9

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

Windows and macOS Installers

• Windows
• macOS x86_64
• macOS aarch64
• Linux install notes

New features

Docker Extensions

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

The extensions in the bundled catalog have been tested to work with Rancher Desktop 1.9. Some extensions only work with the moby container engine; they will not be displayed in the catalog when using containerd.

The Epinio extension only works when Kubernetes has been enabled.

Additional extensions can be installed via the CLI but may not work with Rancher Desktop.

Preferences for experimental settings

The following settings were previously only configurable via rdctl. They have been added to the Preferences dialog, which has been extended with additional tabs:

Windows

• A new networking stack implementation can be selected that works better in VPN environments. This new stack now automatically configures port forwarding as well.

macOS

• Virtual machine type can be set to qemu or vz (Apple Virtualization Framework). vz requires macOS 13.0 Ventura on Intel and macOS 13.3 on Arm (M1, M2) machines. Rosetta can be enabled to run Intel container images on M1/M2 computers under vz emulation.

• Directory mounting can use virtiofs instead of the default reverse-sshfs mode when using vz.

• The socket-vmnet driver can be selected instead of the default vde-vmnet driver. It is only being used when running with administrative privileges to provide a routable (bridged) IP address on the local network.

macOS and Linux

• Directory mounting can use 9p instead of reverse-sshfs. Various parameters of the 9p protocol can be configured as well.

Windows Proxy support

• Many thanks to @tperale for contributing an implementation of proxy support on Windows. The proxy settings can be configured via the Preferences dialog and via rdctl.

Locked Settings in Deployment Profiles

• For enterprise deployments, an administrator can now lock any setting globally to enforce company policy. Locked settings get a 🔒 icon in the Preferences dialog and cannot be modified.

Important bug fixes

Apple Virtualization Framework

• Several fixes to support for VZ emulation mode have been applied.

• Rosetta is now configured correctly.

• The 3 minute timeout during VM shutdown has been fixed.

Kubernetes service port forwarding

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

• The default window size of the application has been increased.

• The default container engine has been changed from containerd to moby. This only affects new installations, and factory-reset.

• By default, Rancher Desktop will no longer request administrative access. That is need for a routable (bridged) IP address, and for creating the Docker socket in the default /var/run/docker.sock location.

  Rancher Desktop also sets up a rancher-desktop docker context and selects it, so having the socket in the default location is not necessary in most situation. Administrative access can be requested via the Preferences dialog.

  This change also only affects new installations, and factory reset. Existing configurations will not be modified.

Updates to bundled utilities

• helm 3.11.2 → 3.12.0
• docker 23.0.1 → 24.0.2
• docker-buildx 0.10.4 → 0.10.5
• docker-compose 2.16.0 → 2.18.1
• docker-credential-ecr-login 0.6.0 → 0.7.1
• nerdctl 1.2.1 → 1.4.0
• trivy 0.38.2 → 0.42.0

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 and v1.9.0 milestones.

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.

Rancher Desktop 1.8.1

This is the 1.8.1 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Installers

• Windows
• macOS x86_64
• macOS aarch64
• Linux install notes

This patch release fixes one issue in Rancher Desktop 1.8.0

The new experimental deployment profile functionality was broken on Windows. This has been fixed.

There are no other changes in this release compared to 1.8.0

Please check the Rancher Desktop 1.8.0 release notes for a comprehensive list of new features and bug fixes.

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.8.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.8.1 milestone.

Rancher Desktop 1.8.0

This is the 1.8.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Installers

• Windows
• macOS x86_64
• macOS aarch64
• Linux install notes

New Features

Configurable application behavior, e.g. auto-start at login

Some aspects of application behavior can now be configured via the Application | Behavior preferences:

• Automatically start at login
• Start in the background
• Quit when closing the application window
• Hide notification icon

All application settings can be changed via rdctl

Both rdctl start and rdctl set can be used to pass values for any configuration setting except

• diagnostics.showMuted
• WSL.integration

Use rdctl set --help to get list of settings supported on the current platform.

Deployment profile (experimental)

Deployment profiles can be used both by the user and by administrators to provide initial preference settings on first-run (or after a factory-reset), and to lock down settings, so they cannot be changed via the GUI or CLI.

New networking stack on Windows (experimental)

An experimental network stack on Windows should provide better compatibility with various VPN configurations. It also uses its own network namespace, providing better isolation from other WSL2 distros on the same machine. It is still a work-in-progress (port forwarding has to be performed manually) and has some limitations (WSL integration is not yet implemented). Please read the documentation section in the Epic to see how to enable and use it. Please provide feedback if you run into any problems beyond the documented limitations.

Support for Apple Virtualization framework on macOS (experimental)

On macOS, it is now possible to use experimental support for the Virtualization framework instead of QEMU for running the virtual machine. Unlike QEMU it supports more than 8 CPUs on aarch64 machines. There are several known performance and stability issues, so this is for evaluation purposes only. Virtual machine type can be switched with from QEMU to VZ with

rdctl set --virtual-machine.type vz

Important Bug fixes and enhancements

Kubernetes 1.26 and Moby

Kubernetes 1.26 now works again with both container engines.

Additional mount points on macOS

On macOS, the directories /Volumes and /var/folders are automatically mounted into the VM, so any directories under them can be bound into containers. This includes the $TMPDIR directory.

Kubernetes ingress binding to 0.0.0.0 on Windows

On Windows, the Kubernetes loadbalancer services are now bound to all interfaces, so they can be accessed from other machines on the local network (just like on macOS). The old behavior (binding only to 127.0.0.1) can be restored with

rdctl set --kubernetes.ingress.localhost-only true

This cannot yet be configured via the GUI.

socket_vmnet has been updated on macOS (experimental)

socket_vmnet is going to be the replacement for the current vde_vmnet driver that is responsible for creating routable IP addresses (requires running with "administrative access"). There have been several bug fixes to socket_vmnet. Select it with:

rdctl set --experimental.virtual-machine.socket-fmnet=true

File sharing via 9p on macOS (experimental)

On macOS, the alternate filesystem protocol 9p can now be selected via rdctl instead of creating a Lima override.yaml file

rdctl set--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.type 9p

9p mount options can also be configured; they will apply to all mounted volumes:

--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.cache-mode string         (Allowed values: [none, loose, fscache, mmap])
--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.msize-in-kb int           maximum packet size
--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.protocol-version string   (Allowed values: [9p2000, 9p2000.u, 9p2000.L])
--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.security-model string     (Allowed values: [passthrough, mapped-xattr, mapped-file, none])

Known issues

Experimental features can only be configured via rdctl

They are not exposed via the Preferences dialog yet.

Allowed Images

When the Allowed Images list is enabled, all images from *.pkg.dev (the Google CDN) are implicitly allowed to enable pulling from Google Cloud registries.

The format used to specify image patterns is still subject to change.

Long time to shut down Rancher Desktop when using the Virtualization framework

Due to a bug in the bindings, there is a "panic" in the shutdown of the VM (also visible in the logs), which will take an additional 3 minutes to time out.

Experimental Features

The following features are considered "experimental" and may change in incompatible ways (or be removed) without advance notice:

rdctl commandline syntax

If changes are made, the old syntax will continue to be supported if possible, but this cannot be guaranteed.

The output of rdctl command may also change in the future. E.g. rdctl list-settings currently just dumps out the settings object in JSON format, but could provide a better organized / readable format in the future.

API

The Rancher Desktop backend provides an API that is used both by the GUI frontend and by rdctl, and can also be used directly via rdctl api. The API is versioned, but the version might change without prior notice, and backward compatibility should not be expected.

Allowed Images

The allowed image list is still considered experimental, mostly because the pattern format is still going to change from extended regular expressions (intentionally under-documented) to simple wildcard matches.

New networking stack

The new networking stack implementation is still ongoing. It is not yet a full implementation on Windows, and not yet available on Linux and macOS at all.

Filesharing via 9p on macOS

socket_vmnet networking driver on macOS

Virtualization framework on macOS

This configuration is still considered experimental in the Lima project, which Rancher Desktop uses on macOS to implement the virtual machine. There are various known performance and stability problems that have to be resolved upstream.

Deprecated Features

This section provides a warning about features that will become unsupported in the future.

Catalina

Support for macOS Catalina will be removed in Rancher Desktop 1.10.

Kubernetes 1.24.1 to 1.24.3 with Moby engine

Kubernetes 1.24.1 to 1.24.3 will no longer work with the moby engine in Rancher Desktop 1.10. They will continue to work with containerd. Kubernetes 1.24.4 and later will continue to be supported with moby.

Removed Features

No features have been removed in this release

Updates to bundled utilities

• docker 20.10.21 → 23.0.1
• docker-buildx 0.9.1 → 0.10.4
• docker-compose 2.14.0 → 2.16.0
• helm 3.10.2 → 3.11.2
• nerdctl 1.0.0. → 1.2.1
• trivy 0.35.0 → 0.38.3

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.7.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.8.0 milestone.

Rancher Desktop 1.7.0

This is the 1.7.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Important Updates

New Windows MSI installer

This allows enterprise rollout using group policy, or other system management systems. Work is still ongoing to make the MSI installer more configurable in the following releases, so that the initial Rancher Desktop configuration can be specified during install as well.

Allowed Images (Experimental)

The Allowed Images list lets the user control which images can be pulled from (and pushed to) registries. The images are configured via patterns in the Container Runtime preferences dialog. This is not a security barrier, but helps to conform to local policy, e.g. to prevent a helm install from pulling images from an unexpected source. Read more in the docs.

Please report any problems pulling (or pushing) images while the Allowed Images list is enabled as GitHub issues.

Reclaim unused space (macOS only)

On macOS, any unused disk space in the data volume (e.g. from deleted images) will be returned to the host when the application is closed.

Use compressed k3s images

For Kubernetes 1.21 and later, Rancher Desktop will now download (and cache) compressed image tarballs (e.g. 160MB instead of 470MB per version). It will continue to use uncompressed images already in the cache to avoid downloading them again unless you do a factory reset and delete all cached images.

Other updates and fixes

Help buttons in Preferences dialog

The Preferences dialog pages now have a help button (question mark in a circle) that will link directly to the corresponding manual page.

The online documentation is now versioned, so any links from the app will always go to the corresponding version of the documentation.

rdctl factory-reset

It is now possible to run a factory reset from the command line even when Rancher Desktop isn't running, so it can be used to clean up a broken installation that won't even start.

Updated Utilities

• docker 20.10.17 → 20.10.21
• docker-compose 2.11.1 → 2.14.0
• helm 3.9.4 → 3.10.2
• nerdctl 0.23.0 → 1.0.0
• trivy 0.32.0 → 0.35.0

Known Issues

Downgrading from 1.7

Downgrading from Rancher Desktop 1.7.0 to previous releases requires a factory reset (as usual) with the "Keep all cached images" option disabled because previous versions don't work correctly when they encounter compressed image tarballs in the cache. Details are in the FAQ.

On Windows, it is also possible that the privileged helper process needs to be uninstalled manually; see the docs for more details.

Kubernetes 1.26

Kubernetes 1.26 is only supported with the containerd engine in this release. Use Kubernetes 1.25 or earlier if you need to use the docker socket with the moby engine.

Allowed Images

When the Allowed Images list is enabled, all images from *.pkg.dev (the Google CDN) are implicitly allowed to enable pulling from Google Cloud registries.

The format used to specify image patterns is still subject to change.

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.6.2, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.7.0 milestone.

Rancher Desktop 1.6.2

This is the 1.6.2 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

This patch release fixes an incompatibility with macOS Ventura

Rancher Desktop 1.6.0 and 1.6.1 do not work properly with macOS 13 Ventura. When running Kubernetes versions 1.24.* or 1.25.*, the VM would hang right away before becoming ready. With earlier versions, Kubernetes would work initially, but start hanging after restarting Rancher Desktop. This issue has been fixed.

There are no other changes in this release compared to 1.6.1.

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.6.1, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.6.2 milestone.

Rancher Desktop 1.6.1

This is the 1.6.1 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

This patch release fixes 3 regressions in the 1.6.0 release

• On Windows, the host.rancher-desktop.internal and host.docker.internal names did not resolve.

• On macOS, the bridged interface was not being used, even when running with administrative rights, and only port forwarding to localhost was active.

• On macOS and Linux, upgrades from a previous release did not update all files inside the VM. In particular, nerdctl would stay at the previous version (e.g. 0.22.2 in Rancher Desktop 1.5.1) instead of being upgraded to 0.23.0.

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.6.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.6.1 milestone.

Rancher Desktop 1.6.0

This is the 1.6.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Important Updates

Forwarding ports to external interfaces on Windows

Automatic port forwarding has been re-implemented by Rancher Desktop and no longer relies on the builtin forwarding from WSL. It is now possible to specify the interface to bind to, and binds to 0.0.0.0 (all host interfaces) by default. To keep a port bound to localhost only, you have to specify it explicitly:

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:8081:80 nginx

Port forwarding now works the same way on macOS and Windows (Linux does not yet support binding to external ports).

Note that you will still need to open up the port in the firewall to allow other machines on the local network to access it.

New Diagnostics feature

Rancher Desktop has a new Diagnostics tab. If there are any failed tests, It will display a red badge with the number of failures in the left-hand menu. This is supposed to work like the "Check Engine" light in a car: to alert you to potential issues with Rancher Desktop or your environment. You can "mute" diagnostics that are not applicable to your situation.

In this release, we only have a handful of diagnostics related to PATH settings and the online state of the host machine. We will add more diagnostics in the future.

Experimental support for faster ingress on macOS

When running with administrative privileges, Rancher Desktop will create a bridged interface on the local network for ingress using a separate IP address from the host machine. This functionality is provided by the vde_vmnet daemon.

The new socket_vmnet daemon has supported 2 to 3 times the throughput of vde_vmnet during testing. However, we found during testing that VMNET may get locked up, and the only way to recover was to reboot the host. Therefore the new daemon must be enabled manually right now:

rdctl api --method PUT --body '{"kubernetes":{"experimental":{"socketVMNet":true}}}' settings

Please file a Github issue including log files if you test the new socket_vmnet daemon and run into any problems!

Updated Utilities

• docker-buildx has been upgraded from 0.8.2 → 0.9.1
• docker-compose has been upgraded from 2.6.1 → 2.11.1
• helm has been upgraded from 3.9.1 → 3.9.4
• nerdctl has been upgraded from 0.22.0 → 0.23.0
• trivvy has been upgraded from 0.30.0 → 0.32.0

Important bug fixes

Updated DNS resolver

There have been fixes to the DNS resolver on all platforms regarding truncated responses.

On Windows, we discovered that due to a configuration error the 1.5.x builds did not include the DNS bug fixes we had developed for it, so there a multiple other DNS related fixes in this Windows version. Please re-test if you had problems with DNS and create/update Github issues if the problems still persist!

Factory Reset on Windows no longer restarts Rancher Desktop automatically

This makes it possible to use it to remove (most of) the data files installed by Rancher Desktop without them being recreated immediately.

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.5.1, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.6.0 milestone.

Rancher Desktop 1.5.1

This is the 1.5.1 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux. The patch release mainly contains fixes to below bugs:

• Automatic forwarding of NodePorts to the host not working with recent releases of Kubernetes
• Problems with pushing images to Docker Hub using nerdctl
• Issue running amd64 images on Mac M1

Known Issues

• There's an inconsistent issue related to running nerdctl commands. Please check #2689 for more details and a quick workaround.

You can connect with the developers via:

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.5.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.5.1 milestone.