Rancher Desktop Setup for K8s on your macOS laptop

Image courtesy of author

For my personal K8s test lab on my MacBook, I use Rancher Desktop. I’ve tried out MiniKube (awesome), MultiPass + K3s (awesome) and K3d (also awesome) before, but Rancher Desktop with K3s under the hood feels more performant and there are some good reasons to use it.

Tested Jun 2023 with Rancher Desktop 1.9 ✅

Top reasons I use Rancher Desktop

1. No $$ Docker Desktop if you’re working for a profitable company
2. No local cluster root access — Rancher Desktop allows you to opt out of this
3. No need to edit /etc/hosts to add the VM — we can use .localhost magic and modern browsers
4. No need to install & configure the kubectl/helm command line utils — Rancher Desktop will install these and add them to to your path

Prerequisites

• Rancher Desktop: https://rancherdesktop.io/ (tested on version 1.7.0)
• MacBook with 16 GB mem

During installation, you can choose what K8s version to run, the container client, and configuring the $PATH. I pick the version my customer is running or the most current stable version (1.25.3), containerd, and Automatic path configuration as shown below.