To deploy Swarm in Rancher, you’ll first need to create a new environment that has specified the cluster management to be Swarm.
In the dropdown of environments, click on the Manage Environments. To create a new environment, click on Add Environment, select Swarm as the cluster management, provide a Name, Description (Optional). If access control is turned on, you can add members and select their membership role. Anyone added to the membership list would have access to your environment.
After a Swarm environment has been created, you can navigate to the environment by either selecting the name of the environment in the environment’s dropdown in the upper right hand corner or by selecting Switch to this Environment in the specific environment’s drop down.
Note: As Rancher adds support for multiple cluster management frameworks, Rancher currently does not support the ability to switch between environments that already have services running in it.
After a Swarm environment has been created, you can start the Swarm cluster by adding at least one host to your environment. The process of adding hosts is the same steps for all cluster management types. Once the first host has been added, Rancher will automatically start the deployment of the required Swarm components (i.e. swarm and swarm-agent) on at least one host. You can see the progress of the deployment by accessing the Swarm tab.
Note: The swarm agent does not need to be deployed on all hosts.
Once the setup has completed, you can begin to create or manage your own Swarm applications via the following ways:
Rancher provides full CRUD capability of creating projects. In the Swarm tab, click on the Projects and click Add Project. When adding a project, you can input your docker-compose.yml either by reading a file or copying and pasting the contents directly into the UI. If your compose-template contains any environment interpolation, you will need to declare the variables by adding variable substitution. Click on Create.
Rancher supports the capability of hosting a catalog of Swarm templates. To use a template, click on the Catalog tab. Select the template that you want to launch and click View Details. Review and edit the stack name, stack description, and configuration options and click on Launch.
If you want to add your own templates to Swarm, you add them to the Rancher catalog and place your templates in a swarm-templates folder.
To configure your own workstation to work with swarm, click on Swarm -> CLI -> Generate Config to generate the necessary API key and configuration file into a docker-cli.zip file. Follow the instructions in the UI to set up TLS and connect to Docker.
Rancher provides a convenient shell access to instance that can be used to execute docker or docker-compose commands.