Rancher Machine, a fork of Docker Machine

Machine lets you create Docker hosts on your computer, on cloud providers, and inside your own data center. It creates servers, installs Docker on them, then configures the Docker client to talk to them.

Installation and documentation

The original full Docker Machine documentation is available here.

This project is intended to be embedded and executed by the full Rancher product and the stand alone cli functionality will remain but the human use of it will not be the primary focus as we will expect inputs provided by other things like Terraform or UIs.

Cli binaries can be found in our Releases Pages

Issues

For historical context you can read the Docker Machine Issues but all new issues created for Rancher Machine will need to be created in Rancher

Driver Plugins

In addition to the core driver plugins bundled alongside Rancher Machine, users can make and distribute their own plugin for any virtualization technology or cloud provider. To browse the list of known Rancher Machine plugins, please see this document in our docs repo.

Branching and Versioning

The master branch is used for ongoing development and always contains the latest release. Tags created from master are consumed by Rancher’s main branch.

In addition to master, this repository maintains multiple release branches. Each branch name corresponds to the Rancher release line that consumes tags cut from that branch.

Whenever a new Rancher release branch is created, a corresponding branch is also created in this repository from master.

After a release branch is created, it only receives bug fixes and security patches. New tags created from a release branch increment only the .x suffix of the version number. For example, at the time of writing, v0.15.0-rancher142.2 is the latest tag in the release/v2.14 branch. Subsequent tags from that branch would be v0.15.0-rancher142.3, v0.15.0-rancher142.4, and so on.

Release candidates will also be created from release branches before the corresponding release is published. This is necessary because CVE fixes may require a high volume of releases.

Machine Branch	Rancher Releae line
master	main
release/v2.14	v2.14
release/v2.13	v2.13

Automated master release candidates

The daily Daily Master Tag workflow compares the current master commit with the latest supported Rancher tag matching vX.Y.Z-rancherN or vX.Y.Z-rancherN-rc.M. If they differ, it creates the next release-candidate tag; otherwise it exits without creating a tag. Starting from a stable vX.Y.Z-rancherN tag, the first candidate is vX.Y.Z-rancher(N+1)-rc.0; each subsequent changed master commit increments the rc number. RC tags are for validating the next release from master; stable release tags continue to be created explicitly, and release branches continue to use the dotted patch suffix described above. Other Rancher tag formats, including dotted patch tags, are ignored by the automated RC tagger.

Releasing a New Version

• Prerequisite:

  • Ensure all release changes are already merged into the master branch before creating a tag. This process creates the tag from the latest master commit.

• Prepare master and remote:

  • Choose your release remote (replace <remote>):

    • git fetch <remote> --tags
    • git checkout master
    • git pull --ff-only <remote> master

• Verify the latest tag (locally):

  • git describe --tags --abbrev=0

• Create tag (from latest master):

  • git tag v0.15.0-rancher<NEW-VERSION>

• Push the tag to your remote:

  • Push single tag: git push <remote> v0.15.0-rancher<NEW-VERSION>

• Verify the tag is on the remote:

  • git ls-remote --tags <remote> | grep v0.15.0-rancher<NEW-VERSION>