Rancher provides a catalog of application templates that make it easy to deploy these complex stacks. By accessing the Catalog tab, you can view all the templates that are available in the enabled catalogs. The Library catalog contains templates from the Rancher certified catalog and the Community catalog contains templates from the community-catalog. Rancher will only be maintaining support for the certified templates in the library.
Adding a catalog is as simple as adding a catalog name, a URL and a branch name. The URL needs to be one that git clone can handle. The branch name must be a branch that is in your catalog URL. If no branch name is provided, it will use the master branch by default. Whenever you add a catalog entry, it will be immediately available in your catalog.
There are two types of catalogs that can be added into Rancher. There are global catalogs and environment catalogs. In a global catalog, the catalog templates are available in all environments. In an environment catalog, the catalog templates are only available in the environment that the catalog is added to.
An admin of Rancher has the ability to add or remove catalogs globally in Rancher under Admin -> Settings.
Any users of a Rancher environment has the ability to add or remove environment catalogs in their respective Rancher environment in Catalog -> Manage.
If you are running Rancher server behind a proxy, you will need to start Rancher with certain environment variables in order for the Rancher catalog to work in Rancher.
The infrastructure services that are available to be enabled in an environment template, are from the infra-templates folder of any catalog enabled in Rancher.
These services are also available from the Catalog tab, and you will be able to see all the infrastructure services even though they may not work with the selected orchestration type. It’s recommended to select infrastructure services during environment template creation versus launching them directly from the catalog.
Search for your desired template or use the filters for category or catalog. Once you have found your template, click on Launch. Fill in the required information for the template.
docker-compose.yml and rancher-compose.yml files that are being used to generate the stacks by expanding Preview before creating the stack.After you click on Create, the stack is immediately created, but none of the services have started. Click on Start Services from the stack dropdown menu to start all the services of the stack.
The great thing about Rancher is that if a newer version of a template has been uploaded to the catalog, we’ll inform you that a newer version is available to upgrade to. When you click on Upgrade Available, you can select which version you want to upgrade to. Always review the information about the version before upgrading, so that you are aware of all potential risks. After selecting the version, the Configuration Options will need to be reviewed before clicking on Save.
After all the services have been upgraded, the stack and services will be in an Upgraded state. If you are satisfied with your upgrade, the last step is to confirm the upgrade by clicking on the Finish Upgrade in the stack dropdown menu. Note: Once you have finished your upgrade, you will not be able to revert to the older version.
If something went wrong during your upgrade and you need to revert to the previous version, you would want to select Rollback in the stack dropdown menu.