The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher Server on DigitalOcean 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 files by executing cd quickstart/do.

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

  4. Edit terraform.tfvars and customize the following variables:

    • do_token - DigitalOcean access key
    • rancher_server_admin_password - Admin password for created Rancher server

  5. Optional: Modify optional variables within terraform.tfvars. See the Quickstart Readme and the DO Quickstart Readme for more information. Suggestions include:

    • do_region - DigitalOcean region, choose the closest instead of the default
    • prefix - Prefix for all created resources
    • droplet_size - Droplet size used, minimum is s-2vcpu-4gb but s-4vcpu-8g could be used if within budget
    • ssh_key_file_name - Use a specific SSH key instead of ~/.ssh/id_rsa (public key is assumed to be ${ssh_key_file_name}.pub)

  6. Run terraform init.

  7. Install the RKE terraform provider, see installation instructions.

  8. To initiate the creation of the environment, run terraform apply --auto-approve. Then wait for output similar to the following:

    Apply complete! Resources: 15 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Outputs:

rancher_node_ip = xx.xx.xx.xx
rancher_server_url = https://rancher.xx.xx.xx.xx.xip.io
workload_node_ip = yy.yy.yy.yy

  9. Paste the rancher_server_url from the output above into the browser. Log in when prompted (default username is admin, use the password set in rancher_server_admin_password).

Result

Two Kubernetes clusters are deployed into your DigitalOcean account, one running Rancher Server and the other ready for experimentation deployments.

What’s Next?

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

Destroying the Environment

  1. From the quickstart/aws folder, execute terraform destroy --auto-approve.

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