Rancher is a platform for running and managing applications in (Docker) containers.
Aside from the Rancher platform, there’s also Rancher OS, a container-native operating system from the same company, which is one of several of such operating systems in active development. See 6 operating systems designed just for Docker and other container runtimes.
In this part 1 of a multi-part article, Nathan Valentine walks you through the process of building Rancher Catalog Templates from the ground up:
Rancher ships with a number of reusable, pre-built application stack templates. Extending these templates or creating and sharing completely new ones are great ways to participate in the Rancher user community and to help your organization effectively leverage container-based technologies.
Although the Rancher documentation is fairly exhaustive, so far documentation on how to get started as a new Catalog template author has consisted of only a single high-level blog post. This article is the first in a series aimed at helping the new Catalog template author ramp-up quickly, with the best available tooling and techniques.
For the first article in this series, we are going to construct a very simple (and not terribly useful) Cattle Catalog template. In an upcoming article, we will flesh out this template with more detail until we have a working multi-container NGINX-based static website utilizing all of the basics of Rancher Compose, Docker Compose, and Rancher Cattle.
