Catalog


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.

An admin of Rancher has the ability to add or remove catalogs in Rancher. The catalogs within Rancher can be found at Admin -> Settings. 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. It will use master by default. Whenever you add a catalog entry, it will be immediately available in your catalog.

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.

Infrastructure Services in the Catalog

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.

Launching Templates

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.

  1. By default, latest version of a template is selected, but if desired, you could select an older version.
  2. Select a stack name and if desired, description of the stack.
  3. Fill in the Configuration Options, which are questions specific to the selected template.
  4. Click on Create to create the stack based on the template. You can review the 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.

Upgrading Templates

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.

Rolling back

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.