Within a project, when you want to deploy applications from catalogs, the applications available in your project will be based on the scope of the catalogs.

If your application is using ingresses, you can program the ingress hostname to an external DNS by setting up a Global DNS entry.

• Prerequisites
• Launching a catalog app
• Configuration options

Prerequisites

When Rancher deploys a catalog app, it launches an ephemeral instance of a Helm service account that has the permissions of the user deploying the catalog app. Therefore, a user cannot gain more access to the cluster through Helm or a catalog application than they otherwise would have.

To launch an app from a catalog in Rancher, you must have at least one of the following permissions:

• A project-member role in the target cluster, which gives you the ability to create, read, update, and delete the workloads
• A cluster owner role for the cluster that include the target project

Before launching an app, you’ll need to either enable a built-in global catalog or add your own custom catalog.

Launching a Catalog App

1. From the Global view, open the project that you want to deploy an app to.

2. From the main navigation bar, choose Apps. In versions before v2.2.0, choose Catalog Apps on the main navigation bar. Click Launch.

3. Find the app that you want to launch, and then click View Now.

4. Under Configuration Options enter a Name. By default, this name is also used to create a Kubernetes namespace for the application.

   • If you would like to change the Namespace, click Customize and enter a new name.
   • If you want to use a different namespace that already exists, click Customize, and then click Use an existing namespace. Choose a namespace from the list.

5. Select a Template Version.

6. Complete the rest of the Configuration Options.

   • For native Helm charts (i.e., charts from the Helm Stable or Helm Incubator catalogs), answers are provided as key value pairs in the Answers section.
   • Keys and values are available within Detailed Descriptions.
   • When entering answers, you must format them using the syntax rules found in Using Helm: The format and limitations of –set, as Rancher passes them as --set flags to Helm. For example, when entering an answer that includes two values separated by a comma (i.e., abc, bcd), wrap the values with double quotes (i.e., "abc, bcd").
7. Review the files in Preview. When you’re satisfied, click Launch.

Result: Your application is deployed to your chosen namespace. You can view the application status from the project’s Workloads view or Apps view. In versions before v2.2.0, this is the Catalog Apps view.

Configuration Options

For each Helm chart, there are a list of desired answers that must be entered in order to successfully deploy the chart. When entering answers, you must format them using the syntax rules found in Using Helm: The format and limitations of –set, as Rancher passes them as --set flags to Helm.

For example, when entering an answer that includes two values separated by a comma (i.e. abc, bcd), it is required to wrap the values with double quotes (i.e., "abc, bcd").

Using a questions.yml file

If the Helm chart that you are deploying contains a questions.yml file, Rancher’s UI will translate this file to display an easy to use UI to collect the answers for the questions.

Key Value Pairs for Native Helm Charts

For native Helm charts (i.e., charts from the Helm Stable or Helm Incubator catalogs or a custom Helm chart repository), answers are provided as key value pairs in the Answers section. These answers are used to override the default values.

Available as of v2.1.0

If you do not want to input answers using the UI, you can choose the Edit as YAML option.

With this example YAML:

outer:
  inner: value
servers:
- port: 80
  host: example

Key Value Pairs

You can have a YAML file that translates these fields to match how to format custom values so that it can be used with --set.

These values would be translated to:

outer.inner=value
servers[0].port=80
servers[0].host=example

YAML files

Available as of v2.2.0

You can directly paste that YAML formatted structure into the YAML editor. By allowing custom values to be set using a YAML formatted structure, Rancher has the ability to easily customize for more complicated input values (e.g. multi-lines, array and JSON objects).