Container Management with Rancher

Rancher is an open source software platform that enables organizations to run containers in production. Using Rancher, organizations no longer have to build a container service platform from scratch using a distinct set of open source technologies. Rancher supplies the entire software stack needed to manage containers in production.

All you need to do is to set up a Rancher container with the following command:

docker run -d --restart=always -p 8080:8080 rancher/server

As we can see in the command, the UI is exposed on port 8080. In order to access it, you have to type on our browser http://server_ip:8080. It’s going to look like this: http://192.168.1.100:8080 and not like http://localhost:8080 or http://127.0.0.1:8080.

Don’t worry if you can’t access the UI immediately, because it takes a little while to run. It’s possible to check the log of the container to see if everything is fine by typing:

docker logs -f container_id and see if it’s all right.

When the UI is finally up and running, access it.

All you need to do is to set up a host now, go on the tab Infrastructure, click on Hosts and Add a Host. Then, save the connection to the UI. After clicking on Save, Rancher will give you a command to set up a container that will run on the host machine.

Just copy the docker run command and run it on the host machine. After a little while the host will appear on the UI.

IT’S DONE!!!

Now you can organize and manipulate all containers via Rancher!

Rancher also:

• Includes a distribution of all popular container orchestration and scheduling frameworks today, including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos.
• Supports flexible user authentication plugins and comes with pre-built user authentication integration with Active Directory, LDAP, and GitHub. Rancher supports Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) at the level of environments, allowing users and groups to share or deny access to, for example, development and production environments.
• Rancher users can deploy an entire multi-container clustered application from the application catalog with one click of a button.
• Users can manage the deployed applications and perform fully automated upgrades when new versions of the application become available.
• Rancher maintains a public catalog consisting of popular applications contributed by the Rancher community. Rancher users can create their own private catalogs.

So, why don’t you give it a try?