Rancher Desktop

Rancher Desktop is an open source desktop app for running containers and a local Kubernetes cluster on Windows, macOS and Linux, made by SUSE's Rancher team.

Rancher Desktop gives a developer a container engine and a local Kubernetes cluster on their own machine, managed from one graphical app. It is an open source project of the SUSE Rancher Engineering group, the team behind the Rancher Kubernetes platform, which became part of SUSE in 2020. Its code lives in a GitHub repository under the Apache License 2.0. The app manages images, containers and application configuration, and it can upgrade itself to new versions automatically. On Windows the app runs inside WSL2, and on macOS and Linux it starts a virtual machine. In Preferences the user picks the container engine, containerd with the nerdctl CLI or dockerd (moby) with the docker CLI. The same screen sets the Kubernetes version, which runs on k3s and can be switched off entirely. The Containers and Images views list what is running and stored, and images build from a local Dockerfile. Trivy scans those images for known vulnerabilities, Port Forwarding maps cluster services to local ports, and Troubleshooting holds the logs and a reset. The app suits developers who build container images and test Kubernetes workloads on a laptop before anything reaches a shared cluster. Engineers preparing for a new Kubernetes release can move the local cluster to that version first and watch what breaks. Platform teams that equip many developers can ship a deployment profile whose locked settings pin preference values and limit the allowed images. Rancher Desktop is distributed as open source rather than sold, and its community answers questions in Slack and GitHub Issues. A typical session pulls a base image, builds and tags a new one, scans it, and pushes it to a registry once the scan is clean. Kubernetes manifests can be applied to the k3s cluster with kubectl and checked in the cluster dashboard before they reach production. Docker Compose or nerdctl compose runs a multi-container app from one Compose file. The virtual machine can run x86_64 software through Rosetta or QEMU emulation, and a WebAssembly module can be packaged as an OCI image and pushed like any other. That loop of building, scanning and testing locally is the work Rancher Desktop is installed for.