Unattended installation for Rancher Desktop (macOS)

Preflight Checklist

• I have searched the issue tracker for a feature request that matches the one I want to file, without success.

Problem Description

I’d like to be able to use Rancher Desktop in CI, so need to be able to install it from the command-line. Is there a way to do this, or would appreciate adding one. Are there args for “Rancher Desktop.app”?

Proposed Solution

Add an arg to “Rancher Desktop.app” so it could be run with open -a /Applications/Rancher\ Desktop.app --args "--install" for example.

This would also mean needing to be able to configure it. For example, switch it to dockerd, which is not the default.

Additional Information

Thanks!

[jandubois]

I’m not sure what would be required to automate installation; it is just moving Rancher Desktop.app into the /Applications folder, and even that is not strictly necessary (but please don’t run it from $TMPDIR).

Configuring it automatically is not currently supported, but can probably be made to work by pre-creating some directories and dropping some config files…

But yet another issue is that starting with RD 0.7.0 we need to install some parts as root (the vmnet software that runs as root, potentially setting up the docker.sock, and one other thing I cannot remember right now). So this will pop up a dialog asking for a sudo password on first run (plus another “explainer” dialog just before that).

I’m sure we can figure something out, even if it isn’t an officially supported/endorsed mechanism, but am on vacation now until the end of the year. Will look at it again when I’m back!

[mook-as]

We currently do not have any argument parsing, as Rancher Desktop is designed for interactive development use. We have not focused on non-interactive usage at this point.

I’m going to leave this open, but please be aware that (as far as I know — I’m not the PM) this is not currently in the short term road map, and there are no promises of when this may be implemented.

Thanks for filing the request!