Rancher Hetzner Cloud Quick Start Guide

The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher server on Hetzner Cloud 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 Hetzner Cloud will incur charges.

• Hetzner Cloud Account: You will require an account on Hetzner as this is where the server and cluster will run.
• Hetzner API Access Key: Use these instructions to create a Hetzner Cloud API Key if you don’t have one.
• Terraform: Used to provision the server and cluster to Hetzner.

Getting Started

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

2. Go into the Hetzner folder containing the Terraform files by executing cd quickstart/rancher/hcloud.

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

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

   • hcloud_token - Hetzner API access key
   • rancher_server_admin_password - Admin password for created Rancher server (minimum 12 characters)

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

   • prefix - Prefix for all created resources
   • instance_type - Instance type, minimum required is cx21
   • hcloud_location - Hetzner Cloud location, choose the closest instead of the default (fsn1)

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. Log in when prompted (default username is admin, use the password set in rancher_server_admin_password).

9. ssh to the Rancher Server using the id_rsa key generated in quickstart/rancher/hcloud.

Result

Two Kubernetes clusters are deployed into your Hetzner 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/hcloud folder, execute terraform destroy --auto-approve.

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