This is the 1.14 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Installers
Notable Features & Changes
Bundles the spin cli (experimental)
Rancher Desktop now includes the spin CLI to support building Wasm images.
The js2wasm and kube plugins, as well as the default templates, are installed the first time the WebAssembly support option has been selected in the Container Engine settings.
The plugins and templates are also installed into any distro for which WSL Integration has been enabled.
Option to install the spinkube operator (experimental)
Rancher Desktop now has an option to install the spinkube operator in the Kubernetes settings to support running Spin applications on Kubernetes. It will install and configure cert-manager and the spin-operator into the cluster. This option requires that WebAssembly support is enabled.
The tunnelling network on Windows supports WSL integration
Containers and Kubernetes services can now be accessed from other WSL distributions, as long as WSL Integration is enabled for them.
The tunnelling network implementation is now complete and has become the default setting in this release (for new installations or after a factory reset). Support for the legacy network is scheduled to be removed in the following release (1.15.0).
The timezone inside the VM now matches the timezone on the host
This means CronJobs in Kubernetes can now be specified using localtime.
Known Issues
Windows Networking
There is a known issue with the new network not including all aliased domains (#5239).
Container Dashboard
The dashboard does not update automatically when container states have changed or new containers are introduced (#5775).
Extensions Install - Allowed Images
When using the Allowed Images feature and also specifying extensions in a deployment profile, the extension images must be included in both lists (#4920).
Deprecations
The legacy networking stack on Windows will be removed in 1.15.0
The tunnelling network on Windows has become the default in this release and should be a full superset of the legacy stack capabilities.
We are planning to remove the legacy networking mode in 1.15.0.
vde_vmnet will be removed in 1.15.0
The socket_vmnet daemon provides all the functionality required by Rancher Desktop and is actively maintained while vde_vmnet itself is deprecated.
VZ emulation already uses socket_vmnet unconditionally because it never had support for vde_vmnet.
The option will be removed and socket_vmnet will automatically be used when Administrative Access is enabled.
Kubernetes versions before 1.21.0 will no longer be supported in 1.15.0
Kubernetes only maintains updates for the latest 3 minor releases (so right now only for 1.27.0 and up). Rancher Desktop tries to support a wider range of legacy versions, but sometimes it becomes necessary to remove support for older versions to keep the code maintainable while adding new features.
We intend to remove support for Kubernetes versions before 1.21.0 in Rancher Desktop 1.15.0.
macOS 11 Big Sur and earlier are no longer officially supported
Apple usually only provides security updates for the last 3 major macOS releases. GitHub removes CI runners once the OS is no longer supported. Due to availability of hardware resources and software dependencies, we may be unable to create new Rancher Desktop releases compatible with older macOS versions in the future.
We will try not to break Rancher Desktop on older macOS versions as long as reasonably possible, but those versions should be considered unsupported.
Updates to Bundled Utilities
- docker
25.0.4→26.1.0 - docker-buildx
0.13.0→0.14.1 - docker-compose
2.24.7→2.27.1 - docker-credential-ecr-login
0.7.1→0.8.0 - helm
3.14.2→3.15.1 - moby/buildkit unchanged
0.12.5 - nerdctl
1.7.3→1.7.6 - spin: new
2.5.1 - spin-shim:
0.11.1→0.14.1 - spinkube: new
0.2.0 - trivy
0.49.1→0.51.4
Connect with the developers
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The issue queue
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Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel
Changelog
The full version changelog, from v1.13.1, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.14.0 milestone.