Developing/Testing Rancher Server Container

The Rancher server container is comprised of multiple components (e.g. cattle, rancher-compose-executor, websocket-proxy). It is often more efficient to run rancher/server using a master branch of one of these sub components than it is to build a whole new release of rancher/server. One can use the rancher/server:master container to run different components pointing to specific branches (including master) of the component instead having it pointed to a specific released version.

The list of components compiled in the Rancher server container and their current released version can be found here.

* agent
* rancher-compose-executor
* catalog-service
* websocket-proxy
* go-machine-service
* rancher-auth-service
* secrets-api

REPOS Environment Variable

The REPOS environment variable is a space separated value of the repositories/branches that should be cloned, built, and ran as part of the rancher/server container.

Note: For any repo besides cattle, -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock is required as part of running the Rancher server container.

The value of REPOS environment variable supports two formats.

Specific Branches

You can use any branch for a component with the following format, GIT_URL[,origin/BRANCH] GIT_URL[,origin/BRANCH] .... For example, REPOS=https://github.com/rancher/cattle,origin/custom_branch. When testing personal forks or branches of components, this is the recommended format.

Master Branch on the Rancher Repo

Instead of using the full git URL for the master branch, you can put a component name and it will default the git URL to https://github.com/rancher/<COMPONENT>. For example, cattle would be the same as https://github.com/rancher/cattle.

Note: In the REPOS environment variable, cattle will always be added automatically and run from the master branch.

Examples

Only master branch of cattle

Run the master container using the master branch of cattle.

docker run -p 8080:8080 rancher/server:master

Only otherbranch branch of cattle

Run the master container using the otherbranch branch of cattle.

docker run -p 8080:8080 -e REPOS="https://github.com/rancher/cattle,origin/otherbranch" rancher/server:master

Changing rancher-compose-executor to run from the master branch instead of the released version

Run the master container using the master branch of cattle and rancher-compose-executor. Typically, rancher-compose-executor will use the specific released version that's in the properties file in cattle.

# Option 1:
docker run -p 8080:8080 -e REPOS="rancher-compose-executor" -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock rancher/server:master
# Option 2:
docker run -p 8080:8080 -e REPOS="https://github.com/rancher/rancher-compose-executor" -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock rancher/server:master

Running custom multiple components

Run the master container using the master branch of rancher-compose-executor and a custom branch (i.e. fix-something) of websocket-proxy.

docker run -p 8080:8080 -e REPOS="rancher-compose-executor https://github.com/ibuildthecloud/websocketproxy,origin/fix-something" -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock rancher/server:master

Bind mounting

If you are developing and wish to bind mount the source code instead of cloning from git, then just bind mount to /source/COMPONENT. For example:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v $(pwd)/rancher-compose-executor:/source/rancher-compose-executor  rancher/server:master

Note: Do NOT include your repo in the REPOS environment variable if you are bind mounting.

Restarting

If you restart the master container, all code will be re-pulled and rebuilt. For cattle, it is necessary to restart the container to get the latest. If you are bind mounting in source code, you can build on the host, and then just kill your process (e.g. killall rancher-compose-executor). Once the process dies, cattle will restart the process with the newly built binary.