Installing on Rancher Desktop

Rancher Desktop is an open-source application that provides all the essentials to work with containers and Kubernetes on your desktop.

Prerequisites

• An operating system compatible with Rancher Desktop (Windows, macOS, or Linux).
• Administrative or superuser access on your computer.

Step 1: Installing Rancher Desktop

1. Download Rancher Desktop:
   • Navigate to the Rancher Desktop releases page. We tested this documentation with Rancher Desktop 1.19.1 with Spin v3.2.0, but it should work with more recent versions.
   • Select the appropriate installer for your operating system.
2. Install Rancher Desktop:
   • Run the downloaded installer and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.

Step 2: Configure Rancher Desktop

• Open Rancher Desktop
• Configure containerd as your container runtime engine (under Preferences -> Container Engine).
• Make sure that the Enable Wasm option is checked in the Preferences → Container Engine section. Remember to always apply your changes.

• Navigate to the Preferences -> Kubernetes menu.
• Enable Kubernetes, Traefik and Spin Operator (under Preferences -> Kubernetes ensure that the Enable Kubernetes, Enable Traefik and Install Spin Operator options are checked.)

• Make sure to select rancher-desktop from your Kubernetes contexts: kubectl config use-context rancher-desktop

• Once your changes have been applied, go to the Cluster Dashboard -> Workloads. You should see the spin-operator-controller-manager deployed to the spin-operator namespace.

Step 3: Creating a Spin Application

1. Open a terminal (Command Prompt, Terminal, or equivalent based on your OS).
2. Create a new Spin application: This command creates a new Spin application using the http-js template, named hello-k3s.

  $ spin new -t http-js hello-k3s --accept-defaults
  $ cd hello-k3s

3. We can edit the /src/index.js file and make the workload return a string “Hello from Rancher Desktop”:

import { AutoRouter } from 'itty-router';

let router = AutoRouter();

router
    .get("/", () => new Response("Hello from Rancher Desktop")) // <-- this changed
    .get('/hello/:name', ({ name }) => `Hello, ${name}!`)

addEventListener('fetch', (event) => {
    event.respondWith(router.fetch(event.request));
});

Step 4: Deploying Your Application

1. Push the application to a registry:

$ npm install
$ spin build
$ spin registry push ttl.sh/hello-k3s:0.1.0

Replace ttl.sh/hello-k3s:0.1.0 with your registry URL and tag.

2. Deploy your Spin application to the cluster:

Use the spin-kube plugin to deploy your application to the cluster

spin kube scaffold --from ttl.sh/hello-k3s:0.1.0 | kubectl apply -f -

If we click on the Rancher Desktop’s “Cluster Dashboard”, we can see hello-k3s is running inside the “Workloads” dropdown section:

To access our app outside of the cluster, we can forward the port so that we access the application from our host machine:

$ kubectl port-forward svc/hello-k3s 8083:80

To test locally, we can make a request as follows:

$ curl localhost:8083
Hello from Rancher Desktop

The above curl command or a quick visit to your browser at localhost:8083 will return the “Hello from Rancher Desktop” message: