- /rancher/v2.x/en/installation/air-gap-installation/prepare-private-reg/

A. Collect Images

Start by collecting all the images needed to install Rancher in an air gap environment. You'll collect images from your chosen Rancher release, RKE, and (if you're using a self-signed TLS certificate) Cert-Manager.

  1. Using a computer with internet access, browse to our releases page and find the Rancher v2.1.x release that you want to install. Don't download releases marked rc or Pre-release, as they are not stable for production environments.

    Choose Release Version

  2. From the release's Assets section (pictured above), download the following three files, which are required to install Rancher in an air gap environment:

    Release File Description
    rancher-images.txt This file contains a list of all files needed to install Rancher.
    rancher-save-images.sh This script pulls all the images in the rancher-images.txt from Docker Hub and saves all of the images as rancher-images.tar.gz.
    rancher-load-images.sh This script loads images from the rancher-images.tar.gz file and pushes them to your private registry.

  3. Make rancher-save-images.sh an executable.

    chmod +x rancher-save-images.sh

  4. From the directory that contains the RKE binary, add RKE's images to rancher-images.txt, which is a list of all the files needed to install Rancher.

    rke config --system-images >> ./rancher-images.txt 1. Default Rancher Generated Self-Signed Certificate Users Only: If you elect to use the Rancher default self-signed TLS certificates, you must add the cert-manager image to rancher-images.txt as well. You may skip to B. Publish Images if you are using you using your own certificates.

    1. Fetch the latest cert-manager Helm chart and parse the template for image details.

      plain helm fetch stable/cert-manager helm template ./cert-manager-<version>.tgz | grep -oP '(?<=image: ").*(?=")' >> ./rancher-images.txt

    2. Sort and unique the images list to remove any overlap between the sources.

      plain sort -u rancher-images.txt -o rancher-images.txt

  5. Run rancher-save-images.sh with the rancher-images.txt image list to create a tarball of all the required images.

    plain ./rancher-save-images.sh --image-list ./rancher-images.txt

    Step Result: Docker begins pulling the images used for an air gap install. Be patient. This process takes a few minutes. When the process completes, your current directory will output a tarball named rancher-images.tar.gz. Check that the output is in the directory.

B. Publish Images

Using a computer with access to the internet and your private registry, move the images from rancher-images.txt to your private registry using the image scripts.

Note: Image publication may require up to 20GB of empty disk space.

  1. Log into your private registry if required.

    plain docker login <REGISTRY.YOURDOMAIN.COM:PORT>

  2. Use rancher-load-images.sh to extract, tag and push rancher-images.txt and rancher-images.tar.gz to your private registry.

    plain ./rancher-load-images.sh --image-list ./rancher-images.txt --registry <REGISTRY.YOURDOMAIN.COM:PORT>

Next: Install Kubernetes with RKE