Rancher Linode Quick Start Guide
The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher server on Linode 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 Linode will incur charges.
- Linode Account: The Linode account to run provision server and cluster under.
- Linode Personal Access Token: A Linode Personal Access Token to authenticate with.
- Terraform: Used to provision the server and cluster on Linode.
Getting Started
Clone Rancher Quickstart to a folder using
git clone https://github.com/rancher/quickstart
.Go into the Linode folder containing the Terraform files by executing
cd quickstart/rancher/linode
.Rename the
terraform.tfvars.example
file toterraform.tfvars
.Edit
terraform.tfvars
and customize the following variables:linode_token
- The Linode Personal Access Token mentioned above.rancher_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 Linode Quickstart Readme for more information. Suggestions include:linode_region
- The target Linode region to provision the server and cluster in.- Default:
eu-central
- For a complete list of regions, see the official Region Availability page.
- Default:
prefix
- The prefix for all created infrastructure.linode_type
- The type/plan that all infrastructure Linodes should use.- Default:
g6-standard-2
- For a complete list of plans, see the official Plan Types page.
- Default:
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 and log in when prompted. The default username isadmin
and the password is defined inrancher_server_admin_password
.ssh
into the Rancher Server using theid_rsa
key generated inquickstart/rancher/linode
.
Result
Two Kubernetes clusters are deployed on your Linode 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/linode
folder, executeterraform destroy --auto-approve
.Wait for confirmation that all resources have been destroyed.