Rancher Hetzner Cloud Quick Start Guide
The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher server on Hetzner Cloud in a single-node K3s Kubernetes cluster, with a single-node downstream Kubernetes cluster attached.
The intent of these guides is to quickly launch a sandbox that you can use to evaluate Rancher. These guides are not intended for production environments. For comprehensive setup instructions, see Installation.
Prerequisites
Deploying to Hetzner Cloud will incur charges.
- Hetzner Cloud Account: You will require an account on Hetzner as this is where the server and cluster will run.
- Hetzner API Access Key: Use these instructions to create a Hetzner Cloud API Key if you don't have one.
- Terraform: Used to provision the server and cluster to Hetzner.
Getting Started
Clone Rancher Quickstart to a folder using
git clone https://github.com/rancher/quickstart
.Go into the Hetzner folder containing the Terraform files by executing
cd quickstart/rancher/hcloud
.Rename the
terraform.tfvars.example
file toterraform.tfvars
.Edit
terraform.tfvars
and customize the following variables:hcloud_token
- Hetzner API access keyrancher_server_admin_password
- Admin password for created Rancher server. See Setting up the Bootstrap Password for password requirements.
Optional: Modify optional variables within
terraform.tfvars
. See the Quickstart Readme and the Hetzner Quickstart Readme for more information. Suggestions include:prefix
- Prefix for all created resourcesinstance_type
- Instance type, minimum required iscx21
hcloud_location
- Hetzner Cloud location, choose the closest instead of the default (fsn1
)
Run
terraform init
.To initiate the creation of the environment, run
terraform apply --auto-approve
. Then wait for output similar to the following:Apply complete! Resources: 15 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
Outputs:
rancher_node_ip = xx.xx.xx.xx
rancher_server_url = https://rancher.xx.xx.xx.xx.sslip.io
workload_node_ip = yy.yy.yy.yyPaste the
rancher_server_url
from the output above into the browser. Log in when prompted (default username isadmin
, use the password set inrancher_server_admin_password
).ssh to the Rancher Server using the
id_rsa
key generated inquickstart/rancher/hcloud
.
Result
Two Kubernetes clusters are deployed into your Hetzner account, one running Rancher Server and the other ready for experimentation deployments. Please note that while this setup is a great way to explore Rancher functionality, a production setup should follow our high availability setup guidelines. SSH keys for the VMs are auto-generated and stored in the module directory.
What's Next?
Use Rancher to create a deployment. For more information, see Creating Deployments.
Destroying the Environment
From the
quickstart/rancher/hcloud
folder, executeterraform destroy --auto-approve
.Wait for confirmation that all resources have been destroyed.