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

• master is the primary development branch and always contains the latest changes.
• Tags from master are consumed by Rancher's main branch.
• Each Rancher release line has a corresponding release/vX.Y branch, created from master.
• Release branches only receive bug fixes and security patches.
• Release branch tags increment only the patch suffix (.x).
  • For example, in the release/v2.14 branch: v0.15.0-rancher142.2, v0.15.0-rancher142.3, v0.15.0-rancher142.4
• Release candidates (RCs) may also be created from release branches before a stable release.
• Release candidates (RCs) tag format is vX.Y.Z-rancherN-rc.M where M is incremented for each new RC.

Machine Branch	Rancher Release Line	Tag Format
master	main	vX.Y.Z-rancherN
release/v2.15	v2.15	v0.15.0-rancher145.x
release/v2.14	v2.14	v0.15.0-rancher142.x
release/v2.13	v2.13	v0.15.0-rancher137.x
release/v2.12	v2.12	v0.15.0-rancher133.x

Automated master Release Candidates

The Daily Master Tag workflow runs daily to create RC tags from the master branch.

• If master has changed since the latest vX.Y.Z-rancherN or vX.Y.Z-rancherN-rc.M tag, it creates the next RC tag.
• Otherwise, no tag is created.
• After a stable release (vX.Y.Z-rancherN), RCs start at vX.Y.Z-rancher(N+1)-rc.0 and increment with each new commit.
• Stable releases are still created manually.
• Release branch tags are ignored by this workflow.

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>