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3. Install Rancher |
Now that you have a running RKE cluster, you can install Rancher in it. For security reasons all traffic to Rancher must be encrypted with TLS. For this tutorial you are going to automatically issue a self-signed certificate through cert-manager. In a real-world use-case you will likely use Let's Encrypt or provide your own certificate.
Install the Helm CLI on a host where you have a kubeconfig to access your Kubernetes cluster:
curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3
chmod +x get_helm.sh
sudo ./get_helm.sh
Add the cert-manager Helm repository:
helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
Create a namespace for cert-manager:
kubectl create namespace cert-manager
Install the CustomResourceDefinitions of cert-manager:
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/<VERSION>/cert-manager.crds.yaml
And install it with Helm. Note that cert-manager also needs your proxy configured in case it needs to communicate with Let's Encrypt or other external certificate issuers:
:::note
To see options on how to customize the cert-manager install (including for cases where your cluster uses PodSecurityPolicies), see the cert-manager docs.
:::
helm upgrade --install cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
--namespace cert-manager \
--set http_proxy=http://${proxy_host} \
--set https_proxy=http://${proxy_host} \
--set no_proxy=127.0.0.0/8\\,10.0.0.0/8\\,cattle-system.svc\\,172.16.0.0/12\\,192.168.0.0/16\\,.svc\\,.cluster.local
Now you should wait until cert-manager is finished starting up:
kubectl rollout status deployment -n cert-manager cert-manager
kubectl rollout status deployment -n cert-manager cert-manager-webhook
Next you can install Rancher itself. First, add the Helm repository:
helm repo add rancher-latest https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/latest
Create a namespace:
kubectl create namespace cattle-system
And install Rancher with Helm. Rancher also needs a proxy configuration so that it can communicate with external application catalogs or retrieve Kubernetes version update metadata:
helm upgrade --install rancher rancher-latest/rancher \
--namespace cattle-system \
--set hostname=rancher.example.com \
--set proxy=http://${proxy_host} \
--set noProxy=127.0.0.0/8\\,10.0.0.0/8\\,cattle-system.svc\\,172.16.0.0/12\\,192.168.0.0/16\\,.svc\\,.cluster.local
After waiting for the deployment to finish:
kubectl rollout status deployment -n cattle-system rancher
You can now navigate to https://rancher.example.com
and start using Rancher.
:::caution
If you don't intend to send telemetry data, opt out telemetry during the initial login. Leaving this active in an air-gapped environment can cause issues if the sockets cannot be opened successfully.
:::
These resources could be helpful when installing Rancher: