Rancher Linode Quick Start Guide

The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher server on Linode in a single-node K3s Kubernetes cluster, with a single-node downstream Kubernetes cluster attached.

caution

The intent of these guides is to quickly launch a sandbox that you can use to evaluate Rancher. These guides are not intended for production environments. For comprehensive setup instructions, see Installation.

Prerequisites

caution

Deploying to Linode will incur charges.

• Linode Account: The Linode account to run provision server and cluster under.
• Linode Personal Access Token: A Linode Personal Access Token to authenticate with.
• Terraform: Used to provision the server and cluster on Linode.

Getting Started

1. Clone Rancher Quickstart to a folder using git clone https://github.com/rancher/quickstart.

2. Go into the Linode folder containing the Terraform files by executing cd quickstart/rancher/linode.

3. Rename the terraform.tfvars.example file to terraform.tfvars.

4. Edit terraform.tfvars and customize the following variables:

   • linode_token - The Linode Personal Access Token mentioned above.
   • rancher_server_admin_password - Admin password for created Rancher server. See Setting up the Bootstrap Password for password requirements.

5. Optional: Modify optional variables within terraform.tfvars. See the Quickstart Readme and the Linode Quickstart Readme for more information. Suggestions include:

   • linode_region - The target Linode region to provision the server and cluster in.
     • Default: eu-central
     • For a complete list of regions, see the official Region Availability page.
   • prefix - The prefix for all created infrastructure.
   • linode_type - The type/plan that all infrastructure Linodes should use.
     • Default: g6-standard-2
     • For a complete list of plans, see the official Plan Types page.

6. Run terraform init.

7. To initiate the creation of the environment, run terraform apply --auto-approve. Then wait for output similar to the following:

   Apply complete! Resources: 15 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
   Outputs:
   rancher_node_ip = xx.xx.xx.xx
   rancher_server_url = https://rancher.xx.xx.xx.xx.sslip.io
   workload_node_ip = yy.yy.yy.yy

8. Paste the rancher_server_url from the output above into the browser and log in when prompted. The default username is admin and the password is defined in rancher_server_admin_password.

9. ssh into the Rancher Server using the id_rsa key generated in quickstart/rancher/linode.

Result

Two Kubernetes clusters are deployed on your Linode account, one running Rancher Server and the other ready for experimentation deployments. Please note that while this setup is a great way to explore Rancher functionality, a production setup should follow our high availability setup guidelines. SSH keys for the VMs are auto-generated and stored in the module directory.

What’s Next?

Use Rancher to create a deployment. For more information, see Creating Deployments.

Destroying the Environment

1. From the quickstart/rancher/linode folder, execute terraform destroy --auto-approve.

2. Wait for confirmation that all resources have been destroyed.