Version v0.7.0 of RancherOS, which mainly contains bug fixes and enhancements, was recently released and is now available on our releases page. Since there hasn’t been a blog post since the v0.5.0 release, this post also includes some of the key features implemented as part of v0.6.0 and v0.6.1. In addition to switching the default Docker version to 1.12.1 and kernel version to 4.4.21, the following features have been implemented.
Better Support for Switching Docker Engines
It has always been part of the design of RancherOS to run two instances of Docker. The first is System Docker, which runs as PID 1 and is responsible for managing system services. The other, which we typically call User Docker or just Docker, is actually run as a container managed by System Docker. Starting with v0.6.0, the process for changing the User Docker container has been made much easier.
To support this feature we added the “rancher.docker.engine” cloud-config key, which can be used to specify the Docker version when launching a RancherOS instance. In addition, it’s also possible to easily change the Docker version on a live system with the “ros engine” command. For example, Docker 1.10.3 could be used by running “ros engine switch docker-1.10.3”.
RancherOS comes with multiple versions of Docker already packaged, but this same process can be used to easily package and run custom Docker builds. More information on this feature can be found in our documentation.
Easier Docker Configuration
Docker daemon arguments were previously configured as a list of arguments. This made it difficult to update existing arguments and extend default parameters. As of v0.7.0, Docker daemon arguments can be configured individually and then RancherOS will generate the corresponding command to start the Docker daemon. For example, the storage driver used for Docker can now be switched with “ros config set rancher.docker.storage_driver overlay2”. More information on this feature can be found in our documentation.
Extending ‘write_files’ to all system services
By default, the ‘write_files’ cloud-config key will be applied in the console container. This is a reasonable default and works for most use cases, but it can also be useful to write files in other system services. As of v0.6.0, the ‘container’ subkey of ‘write_files’ can be used to write files into any default system service. This is a very general feature and can be used for performing actions such as writing a custom NTP configuration. More information on this feature can be found in our documentation as well.
‘runcmd’ cloud-config key
RancherOS reads and executes ‘/opt/bin/rancher/bin/start.sh’ and ‘/etc/rc.local’ on boot. The former method for running arbitrary commands on boot was to use ‘write_files’ to write scripts to one of these locations. As the v0.6.0, the standard cloud-init ‘runcmd’ key is supported. This makes embedding arbitrary commands in a cloud-config cleaner and more compatible with the standard cloud-init project. More information on this feature can be found our documentation here.
Conclusion
Many of the features from the last three releases are general in scope and can be applied in many different scenarios. Together these are able to address a lot of features that RancherOS users have requested. To try out some of these features or to get started with RancherOS in general, check out our documentation page. If you have questions or issues, please head over to our Github page or to the RancherOS forums.
The post What’s New in RancherOS v0.7.0 appeared first on Rancher Labs.
