Rancher Desktop playground

Installation and sample use of rancher desktop

What you need

• Azure subscription - most likely part of your Visual Studio subscription
• Github account - free to signup if you don't have one
• Microsoft Remote Desktop - links to downloads
• some time to tinker

Setup

Create a new Virtual Machine in azure. Pay attention to these settings:

• Instance details
  • Security type standard
  • Image Windows 11 Pro
  • Size Standard_D4s_v4
• Inbound port rules
  • Public inbound ports Allow selected ports
  • Select inbound ports RDP (3389)

Install

After the VM is created make a remote desktop connection and run these installations with powershell (as administrator).

# install chocolatey
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
# install openssl
choco install openssl -y
# install git
choco install git -y
# install base64 to decrypt secrets
choco install base64 -y
# install rancher desktop
choco install rancher-desktop -y
# install visual studio code
choco install vscode -y
choco install vscode-yaml -y

Reboot

After installing rancher desktop a reboot is needed.

Final steps

Fork this repository and clone it:

git clone https://github.com/<YOUR_NAME_HERE>/rancher-desktop-playground.git

Start Rancher desktop with the shortcut on the desktop. Accept the defaults for kubernetes and runtime. Now install ingress-nginx and argocd and you're ready for playing.

Custom apps

Now you have a basic kubernetes setup with argocd for gitops deployments. Here are some custom apps you can deploy and tinker with.

The basic flow is adding an application yaml to the apps/localdev folder that points to the localdev overlay. After a git commit/push it will be deployed with argocd.

• website: simple nginx website with a custom index.html