This is the 1.7.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Important Updates
New Windows MSI installer
This allows enterprise rollout using group policy, or other system management systems. Work is still ongoing to make the MSI installer more configurable in the following releases, so that the initial Rancher Desktop configuration can be specified during install as well.
Allowed Images (Experimental)
The Allowed Images list lets the user control which images can be pulled from (and pushed to) registries. The images are configured via patterns in the Container Runtime preferences dialog. This is not a security barrier, but helps to conform to local policy, e.g. to prevent a helm install to pull images from an unexpected source. Read more in the docs.
Please report any problems pulling (or pushing) images while the Allowed Images list is enabled as Github issues.
Reclaim unused space (macOS only)
On macOS, any unused disk space in the data volume (e.g. from deleted images) will be returned to the host when the application is closed.
Use compressed k3s images
For Kubernetes 1.21 and later, Rancher Desktop will now download (and cache) compressed image tarballs (e.g. 160MB instead of 470MB per version). It will continue to use uncompressed images already in the cache to avoid downloading them again unless you do a factory reset and delete all cached images.
Other updates and fixes
Help buttons in Preferences dialog
The Preferences dialog pages now have a help button (question mark in a circle) that will link directly to the corresponding manual page.
The online documentation is now versioned, so any links from the app will always go to the corresponding version of the documentation.
rdctl factory-reset
It is now possible to run a factory reset from the command line even when Rancher Desktop isn't running, so it can be used to clean up a broken installation that won't even start.
Updated Utilities
- docker
20.10.17→20.10.21 - docker-compose
2.11.1→2.14.0 - helm
3.9.4→3.10.2 - nerdctl
0.23.0→1.0.0 - trivy
0.32.0→0.35.0
Known Issues
Downgrading from 1.7
Downgrading from Rancher Desktop 1.7.0 to previous releases requires a factory reset (as usual) with the "Keep all cached images" option disabled because previous versions don't work correctly when they encounter compressed image tarballs in the cache. Details are in the FAQ.
On Windows, it is also possible that the privileged helper process needs to be uninstalled manually; see the docs for more details.
Kubernetes 1.26
Kubernetes 1.26 is only supported with the containerd engine in this release. Use Kubernetes 1.25 or earlier if you need to use the docker socket with the moby engine.
Allowed Images
When the Allowed Images list is enabled, all images from *.pkg.dev (the Google CDN) are implicitly allowed to enable pulling from Google Cloud registries.
The format used to specify image patterns is still subject to change.
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 v1.6.2, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.7.0 milestone.