4 Rancher-Desktop
NB: Before reading on, if you successfully installed Docker in the previous step and it worked, and have not received any express instructions from your supervisor to use Rancher Desktop, ignore this entire section. Based on experience, using Docker is easier than Rancher Desktop, and secondly, Docker and Rancher Desktop cannot work on the same machine. One has to be uninstalled.
What is Rancher Desktop?
Rancher Desktop is an app that provides container management and Kubernetes on the desktop. Rancher Desktop provides the ability to build, push, and pull container images along with the ability to run containers. This is provided by either the Docker CLI (when you choose Moby/dockerd as your engine) or nerdctl (when you choose containerd as your engine). nerdctl is a “Docker-compatible CLI for containerd” provided by the containerd project. Think of Rancher-Desktop as an app that envelops other certain Developer tools such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Rancher Desktop Installation
Go to this website to check the download instructions for your specific OS. In case using windows, the instructions are under this Installing Rancher Desktop on Windows heading.
The releases of various OSs are found here.
Assuming you have already run the Rancher-Desktop executable for your OS, the first interface to appear will look like below. Ensure the Cluster Dashboard button is not greyed out, otherwise this is the first sign of a problem.
You can also check the Diagnostics tab to see everything is working properly.
Click on the Preferences tab.
Ensure the following under Preferences interface match to these settings.
- Ensure that in the Preferences>WSL>Integrations that Ubuntu has been checked.
- Ensure that Preferences>WSL>Network that Enable Network Tunneling is enabled.
- Ensure that in the Preferences>Kubernetes that the Enable Kubernetes and Traefik boxes have been checked. Additionally, ensure that the most stable Kubernetes version is in use.
- Ensure that the Preferences>Container Engine>General menu has the
dockerd (moby)box checked.
During installation, Rancher Desktop will (or may) install Kubernetes configurations by default. You can check that the Kubernetes command-line tool, kubectl has been successfully installed by running kubectl version on your terminal.
It is important to check that you are using Rancher Desktop and not any other application to run certain containers, in this case the ML Classifiers. Type kubectl config get-contexts to see whehter Rancher-Desktop and not any other containerization machine is in use, such as mini-kube.
If it outputs an asterisk (*) next to rancher-desktop as shown below, you are all good to go.
CURRENT NAME CLUSTER AUTHINFO NAMESPACE
minikube minikube minikube default
* rancher-desktop rancher-desktop rancher-desktop
Additionally, to check that Docker and Rancher Desktop are running alright, run docker ps on your terminal. If some logs starting with CONTAINER ID, IMAGE… headers are printed out, Docker is working fine with Rancher Desktop already installed.
In my case I use Rancher-Desktop and here is a screenshot showing that Rancher is working.
