Development and Maintenance Status

RancherOS 1.x is no longer being actively maintained. There are two significant reasons behind this product decision:

1. Docker - The current industry requirements for a container runtime are very much evolving. Container runtimes like containerd and CRIO are now being actively considered as the default choice. RancherOS 1.x, which was specifically designed around using Docker engine only, unfortunately does not lend itself, in its current design, to this new evolving requirement.
2. ISV Support - RancherOS was specifically designed as a minimalistic OS to support purpose-built containerized applications. It was not designed to be used as a general purpose OS (such as CentOS or Ubuntu). As such, most ISVs have not certified their software to run on RancherOS, nor does RancherOS even contain the necessary components for many of these applications to run.

We're working on a replacement. Stay tuned!

RancherOS

The smallest, easiest way to run Docker in production at scale. Everything in RancherOS is a container managed by Docker. This includes system services such as udev and rsyslog. RancherOS includes only the bare minimum amount of software needed to run Docker. This keeps the binary download of RancherOS very small. Everything else can be pulled in dynamically through Docker.

How this works

Everything in RancherOS is a Docker container. We accomplish this by launching two instances of Docker. One is what we call the system Docker which runs as the first process. System Docker then launches a container that runs the user Docker. The user Docker is then the instance that gets primarily used to create containers. We created this separation because it seemed logical and also it would really be bad if somebody did docker rm -f $(docker ps -qa) and deleted the entire OS.

Release

• v1.5.8 - Docker 19.03.15 - Linux 4.14.138

ISO

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rancheros.iso
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/hyperv/rancheros.iso
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/4glte/rancheros.iso
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/vmware/rancheros.iso

Special docker-machine Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/vmware/rancheros-autoformat.iso
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/proxmoxve/rancheros-autoformat.iso

Additional Downloads

AMD64 Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/initrd
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/vmlinuz
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rancheros.ipxe
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rootfs.tar.gz

ARM64 Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/arm64/initrd
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/arm64/vmlinuz
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/arm64/rootfs_arm64.tar.gz
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/arm64/rancheros-raspberry-pi64.zip

Cloud Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rancheros-openstack.img
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rancheros-digitalocean.img
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rancheros-cloudstack.img
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rancheros-aliyun.vhd
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/rancheros-gce.tar.gz

VMware Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/vmware/initrd
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/vmware/rancheros.vmdk
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/vmware/rootfs.tar.gz

Hyper-V Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/hyperv/initrd
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/hyperv/rootfs.tar.gz

Proxmox VE Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/proxmoxve/initrd
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/proxmoxve/rootfs.tar.gz

4G-LTE Links

• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/4glte/initrd
• https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.8/4glte/rootfs.tar.gz

Note:

1. you can use http instead of https in the above URLs, e.g. for iPXE.
2. you can use latest instead of v1.5.8 in the above URLs if you want to get the latest version.

Amazon

SSH keys are added to the rancher user, so you must log in using the rancher user.

HVM

Additionally, images are available with support for Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) here.

Azure

You can get RancherOS in the Azure Marketplace, currently only the rancher user can be logged in through SSH keys.

Documentation for RancherOS

Please refer to our RancherOS Documentation website to read all about RancherOS. It has detailed information on how RancherOS works, getting-started and other details.

Support, Discussion, and Community

If you need any help with RancherOS or Rancher, please join us at either our Rancher forums or #rancher IRC channel where most of our team hangs out at.

For security issues, please email [email protected] instead of posting a public issue in GitHub. You may (but are not required to) use the GPG key located on Keybase.

Please submit any RancherOS bugs, issues, and feature requests to rancher/os.

Please submit any Rancher bugs, issues, and feature requests to rancher/rancher.

License

Copyright (c) 2014-2020 Rancher Labs, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.