This is the 1.19.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Installers
Release Notes for 1.19.0
What's New
Extension update mechanism
The "Extensions" menu item on the left will show a red bubble with a count of all installed extensions that have an update available from the built-in catalog. The cards for those extensions will have an "Update" button in addition to the "Remove" button.
SUSE Application Collection extension
SUSE Application Collection gives access to trusted, curated, and continuously updated applications. This extension helps you integrate the collection into your local development environment by managing authentication, making apps plug-and-play, and helping you stay up-to-date.
Epinio extension is working again
Thanks to the team at Krumware for taking over maintenance of the Epinio extension! (#6580 and #7280)
Open WebUI extension has MCP support
This update adds a simple, secure MCP-to-OpenAPI proxy server running in a container. It provides access to tools using the Model Context Protocol from the LLM.
It comes pre-configured with a docker and a kubernetes MCP server implementation, allowing the model to talk to the local Moby engine or Kubernetes cluster.
VZ emulation and Snapshots are no longer experimental
The --experimental.virtual-machine.type and --experimental.virtual-machine.use-rosetta options in rdctl are now just --virtual-machine.type and --virtual-machine.use-rosetta.
Bug fixes
Kubernetes reset no longer breaks on Windows
When using Kubernetes 1.30.0 or later, a "Kubernetes Reset" would leave Rancher Desktop in a broken state until WSL2 was restarted (or the host rebooted) #8648.
QEMU slow image pulling (on Linux and macOS) has been fixed
The root cause has been a delay in the DNS host resolver implementation (#4258).
Extensions (on macOS) can now call bundled utilities
Extensions were unable to use bundled utilities such as the credential helpers because Rancher Desktop is normally launched by the Finder and does not inherit the user's PATH setting. With this release, the directory with bundled utilities will be added explicitly when an extension invokes external programs (#8598).
docker build on Windows no longer fails intermittently with http2 errors
This was a regression in Rancher Desktop 1.18.* on Windows only due to a buffering issue in the proxy implementation (#8276).
Many thanks to @bcxpro for analyzing the failure and providing a fix! (#8311)
nerdctl on Windows can now use alternate filenames for Dockerfile
This was a bug in the argument translation layer in nerdctl-stub (#8190).
Updates to Bundled Utilities
- amazon-eco-credential-helper unchanged
0.9.1 - docker
27.5.1→28.1.1 - docker-buildx
0.20.1→0.24.0 - docker-compose
2.33.0→2.36.2 - docker-credential-helpers
0.8.2→0.9.3 - helm
3.17.1→3.18.0 - kuberlr
0.5.2→0.6.0 - moby/buildkit
0.19.0→0.21.1 - nerdctl
2.0.3→2.1.1 - spin
3.1.2→3.2.0 - spin-shim
0.18.0→0.19.0 - spinkube unchanged
0.4.0 - trivy
0.59.1→0.62.1
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 v1.18.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.19.0 milestone.