rke

This file is auto-generated from README-template.md, please make any changes there.

Rancher Kubernetes Engine, an extremely simple, lightning fast Kubernetes installer that works everywhere.

🚨 Important Notice: RKE End of Life Announcement

Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) is reaching its end of life. Version 1.8 will be the final release in the RKE 1.x series. We strongly recommend migrating to Rancher's newer Kubernetes distribution, RKE2, to stay supported, secure, and take advantage of the latest features and updates. For more details, please refer to the official SUSE EOL article.

Latest Release

• v1.8
  • v1.8.2 - Read the full release notes.
• v1.7
  • v1.7.6 - Read the full release notes.
• v1.6
  • v1.6.9 - Read the full release notes.

Download

Please check the releases page.

Requirements

Please review the Requirements for each node in your Kubernetes cluster.

Getting Started

Please refer to our RKE docs for information on how to get started! For cluster config examples, refer to RKE cluster.yml examples

Installing Rancher HA using rke

Please use Setting up a High-availability RKE Kubernetes Cluster to install Rancher in a high-availability configuration.

Building

RKE can be built using the make command, and will use the scripts in the scripts directory as subcommands. The default subcommand is ci and will use scripts/ci. Cross compiling can be enabled by setting the environment variable CROSS=1. The compiled binaries can be found in the build/bin directory. Dependencies are managed by Go modules and can be found in go.mod.

Read codegen/codegen.go to check the default location for fetching data.json. You can override the default location as seen in the example below:

# Fetch data.json from default location
go generate

# Fetch data.json from URL using RANCHER_METADATA_URL
RANCHER_METADATA_URL=${URL} go generate

# Use data.json from local file
RANCHER_METATDATA_URL=./local/data.json go generate

# Compile RKE
make

To override RANCHER_METADATA_URL at runtime, populate the environment variable when running rke CLI. For example:

RANCHER_METADATA_URL=${URL} rke [commands] [options]

RANCHER_METADATA_URL=${./local/data.json} rke [commands] [options]

License

Copyright © 2017 - 2025 SUSE LLC Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.