Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a kubectl, docker and a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that’s relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it’s not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).
I am exposing docker via tcp in wsl and set the env var on the host to point to it. A bit more manual but if you don’t need anything special, it works too.
Anyone looking for a free drop in replacement, I’ve been using Rancher Desktop without any issues https://rancherdesktop.io/
I’ve been using podman desktop (https://podman-desktop.io/) which is also free. I’ve never heard of rancher desktop so I’ll have to give that a look!
Rancher is owned by Suse, which is mainly a solid steward in the community.
They also have k8 frontend called Harvestor. It can run VMs directly, which is nice.
I second Podman. I’ve been using it recently and find it to be pretty good!
I am getting into Podman but I cannot force my firewall to respect it for some reason.
How does the image scanning compare to docker scout? (Or whatever the docket desktop one is called).
So does this setup like a one-node kubernetes cluster on your local machine or something? I didn’t know that was possible.
Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a
kubectl,dockerand a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that’s relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it’s not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).Thanks for the info. For others curious, here’s a decent short intro to K3s.
Now I’m kind of wondering if this is light enough for integration tests.
For integration tests I’d go with kind instead. Use it in my work and it works perfectly in our ci/CD. https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/
I use this as well. I haven’t had any issues.
I am exposing docker via tcp in wsl and set the env var on the host to point to it. A bit more manual but if you don’t need anything special, it works too.