Rancher Desktop v1.21.0

This is the 1.21.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to macOS, Windows, and Linux.

⚠️ WARNING for Windows users using the Moby container engine ⚠️

This 1.21.0 release is going to change the docker storage driver from the "classic" setting to the containerd-snapshotter (see below). This is supposed to only happen on new installs or after factory resets.

On Windows however, this is happening unconditionally. Any existing images will become inaccessible by the new driver. They are not deleted (and will continue to take up disk space in the VM). They will get deleted by a factory-reset.

In the 1.22.0 release, we will provide a mechanism to switch back and forth between the classic and the snapshotter driver. This will give users the capability to either clean out the old images or to export them, and then re-import them under the other driver.

Installers

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

Release Notes for 1.21.0

What's New

rdctl info command

rdctl has a new info command that lists the Rancher Desktop version and the IP address of the VM:

❯ rdctl info
Version:   v1.21.0
IPAddress: 192.168.205.2

You can query individual fields for use in scripts:

❯ rdctl info --field ip-address
192.168.205.2

Note: this command is failing for users who have been upgrading Rancher Desktop from version 1.19.3 or earlier, or then restored a snapshot that was based on an earlier installation. If this is happening, you can fix your setup by running:

rdctl shell sudo apk add iproute2

This fix will remain in place until you perform a factory reset or restore from an older snapshot again.

Increasing disk size (Linux and macOS)

Rancher Desktop by default reserves 100GB of disk space for the VM (it is a sparse file, so only the portion in use actually takes up disk space on the host).

It is now possible to increase the maximum size of the VM disk using rdctl:

❯ rdctl set --experimental.virtual-machine.disk-size 120G
Status: reconfiguring Rancher Desktop to apply changes (this may take a while).

This will restart Rancher Desktop, at which time the volume will expand to the larger size. Please note that it is not possible to reduce the maximum size. Unused space in the VM disk will be returned for host usage every time Rancher Desktop is restarted (via fstrim).

There is no GUI mechanism to change the maximum disk size.

Update checker only checks once a day

Rancher Desktop will only check for updates once per day now instead of every hour. This interval is not configurable but the update checks can be disabled completely via both rdctl and the GUI.

Online checker frequency is configurable

By default, Rancher Desktop checks every 5 seconds to update the "online" indicator. It does this by checking for the right redirect response from http://docs.rancherdesktop.io (to https). This also detects when the computer is caught inside a captive portal, like airport or hotel wifi.

You can now change the frequency of this check to a longer value (in milliseconds) or disable it completely by setting it to 0:

❯ rdctl set --diagnostics.connectivity.interval 0
Status: settings updated; no restart required.

Electron will still perform its own online checks (which will also update the Rancher Desktop indicators) but those checks are somewhat unreliable.

There is no mechanism in the GUI to change this setting.

Container Info page with logs

@tylercritchlow has moved the container logs to a container info page. You get to the info page either by clicking the container name or through the menu at the end of the line.

moby now uses containerd snapshotter by default

On new installations, or after a factory reset, Rancher Desktop will now use the containerd snapshotter for storing container images by default. This snapshotter provides additional functionality, such as storing/pushing/pulling multi-platform images. It is also needed for using Wasm containers with docker. This means Rancher Desktop will no longer switch between snapshotters when turning Wasm support on or off, so local images will remain visible to both configuration options.

Updated extensions

The "SUSE Application Collection" extension can now display the collection without having to log in first.

Bug fixes

UDP port forwarding fixed on Linux and macOS

It was already working on Windows. Thanks to @toshs for finding and fixing the issue.

Shadows on macOS 26 Tahoe

Window shadows had a performance issue on macOS 26. This has been fixed by upgrading the Electron version.

Updates to Bundled Utilities (from Rancher Desktop 1.20.1, as of 1.21.0)

• amazon-ecr-credential-helper 0.10.1 → 0.11.0
• docker 28.3.3 → 29.0.2
• docker-buildx 0.26.1 → 0.30.1
• docker-compose 2.39.2 → 2.40.3
• docker-credential-helpers 0.9.3 → 0.9.4
• helm 3.18.6 → 3.19.1
• kuberlr unchanged 0.6.1
• moby/buildkit 0.21.1 → 0.25.2
• nerdctl 2.1.3 → 2.2.0
• spin 3.3.1 → 3.5.1
• spin-shim 0.20.0 → 0.22.0
• spin-operator unchanged 0.6.1
• trivy 0.65.0 → 0.67.2

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.20.1, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.20.0 milestone.