Rancher Desktop v1.20.1

This is the 1.20.1 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Installers

• Windows
• macOS x86_64
• macOS aarch64
• Linux install notes

Release Notes for 1.20.1

This release updates the bundled docker-compose from version 2.39.2 to 2.40.3 to address CVE-2025-62725.

There are no other changes in this patch release.

New Contributors

Thank you to our new contributors: @proski, @lavigneer, and @tylercritchlow!

Release Notes for 1.20.0

What's New

Container Logs

Thanks to @tylercritchlow, the Containers dashboard can now display the container logs. The Logs command is accessible under the ⋮ menu on the right hand side, so it's a bit hidden. This will automatically scroll to the end of the log and it updates automatically as more logs come in.

Container Dashboard Improvements

@tylercritchlow has also made changes to the Containers dashboard itself: it will now automatically update as containers are created, started, stopped or deleted. You no longer need to refresh manually.

As well, containers are now grouped together, either by Kubernetes pod, by docker-compose deployment or in the "Standalone Containers" group for everything else. Groups can individually be collapsed and expanded.

New Volumes page

Another new feature thanks to @tylercritchlow: On the Volumes page, you can see a list of all volumes managed by the container runtime and, if required, delete volumes.

New rdctl reset command

@lavigneer has contributed the new rdctl reset command. It is a refinement of the rdctl factory-reset command, which is still supported, but now deprecated and hidden. It adds the ability to delete the Kubernetes version cache, which was previously only possible from within the GUI.

Command	Function
rdctl reset --vm	deletes VM and creates a new with the same settings
rdctl reset --k8s	deletes deployed Kubernetes workloads
rdctl reset --cache	deletes cached Kubernetes images
rdctl reset --factory	deletes VM and shows first-start dialog again

All options can be combined but some combinations are redundant:

• --factory includes --vm and k8s (but not --cache)
• --vm includes --k8s

VZ emulation mode is now the default on macOS

On a fresh install, or after a factory reset, the default emulation mode on macOS is now VZ instead of QEMU.

The default mount type with VZ is now virtiofs, which is no longer considered "experimental".

Additional locations for system deployment profiles

On macOS, Rancher Desktop will check for system deployment profiles first in /Library/Managed Preferences. If no profile is found there, then it looks in the previous default location at /Library/Preferences. This allows deploying system profiles using MDM solutions.

On Linux, Rancher Desktop continues to look in /etc/rancher-desktop first. But if no profile is found there, it will now also check /usr/etc/rancher-desktop for a system profile before looking in the user profile location.

Additional Diagnostics

When using the moby container engine, Rancher Desktop will now run diagnostics checks to verify that the current docker context is rancher-desktop and that DOCKER_HOST is not set.

On Windows, there is also a new diagnostic that will trigger when the WSL2 version is too old.

Updated extensions

The extension catalog now lists the latest releases of "Epinio", "Open WebUI" and the "SUSE Application Collection".

The "Open WebUI" extension no longer binds to a specific version, but will always attempt to fetch the latest release when it is being restarted.

Vue.JS has been upgraded from Vue2 → Vue3

The Vue JavaScript framework has been updated to the latest version, which required a rather large amount of internal changes. Ideally, this should not be user-visible. Please report any regressions to the GitHub issue tracker.

Bug fixes

Code signing for spin has been fixed

In the previous releases, a bug in the code signed prevented spin from executing applications locally.

Updates to Bundled Utilities (from Rancher Desktop 1.19.3, as of 1.20.0)

• amazon-ecr-credential-helper 0.9.1 → 0.10.1
• docker 28.1.1 → 28.3.3
• docker-buildx 0.25.0 → 0.26.1
• docker-compose 2.37.1 → 2.39.2
• docker-credential-helpers unchanged 0.9.3
• helm 3.18.3 → 3.18.6
• kuberlr 0.6.0 → 0.6.1
• moby/buildkit unchanged 0.21.1
• nerdctl 2.1.1 → 2.1.3
• spin unchanged 3.3.1
• spin-shim 0.19.0 → 0.20.0
• spin-operator 0.5.0 → 0.6.1
• trivy 0.62.1 → 0.65.0

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.19.3, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.20.0 milestone.