The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher Server with a single node cluster attached.

Prerequisites

Note Deploying to DigitalOcean will incur charges.

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

Getting Started

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

  2. Go into the DigitalOcean folder containing the terraform file by executing cd quickstart/do.

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

  4. Edit terraform.tfvars to include your DigitalOcean Access Key.

  5. Optional: Edit terraform.tfvars to:

    • Change the number of nodes. (count_agent_all_nodes)
    • Change the password of the admin user for logging into Rancher. (admin_password)

  6. Run terraform init.

  7. To initiate the creation of the environment, run terraform apply. Then wait for the following output:

    Apply complete! Resources: 2 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed. 
  Outputs: 
  rancher-url = [ 
          https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 
  ]

  8. Paste the rancher-url from the output above into the browser. Log in when prompted (default password is admin).

Result: Rancher Server and your Kubernetes cluster is installed on DigitalOcean.

What’s Next?

Use Rancher to create a deployment. For more information, see Creating Deployments.

Destroying the Environment

  1. From the quickstart/do folder, execute terraform destroy --force.

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