5 Rancher Dashboard Extensions #

To enable extensions Rancher requires ui-plugin operator to be installed. When using the Rancher Dashboard UI, navigate to Extensions in the left navigation Configuration section. If the ui-plugin operator is not installed you’ll get a prompt asking to enable the extensions support as described here.

The operator can be also installed using Helm:

helm repo add rancher-charts https://charts.rancher.io/
helm upgrade --create-namespace -n cattle-ui-plugin-system \
  --install ui-plugin-operator rancher-charts/ui-plugin-operator
helm upgrade --create-namespace -n cattle-ui-plugin-system \
  --install ui-plugin-operator-crd rancher-charts/ui-plugin-operator-crd

Or with Fleet by creating a dedicated GitRepo resource. For more information see Fleet (Chapter 6, Fleet) section and fleet-examples repository.

All SUSE Edge 3.0 components including dashboard extensions are distributed as OCI artifacts. Rancher Dashboard Apps/Marketplace does not support OCI based Helm repositories yet. Therefore, to install SUSE Edge Extensions you can use Helm or Fleet:

5.2.1 Installing with Helm #

 

# KubeVirt extension
helm install kubevirt-dashboard-extension oci://registry.suse.com/edge/kubevirt-dashboard-extension-chart --version 1.0.0 --namespace cattle-ui-plugin-system

# Akri extension
helm install akri-dashboard-extension oci://registry.suse.com/edge/akri-dashboard-extension-chart --version 1.0.0 --namespace cattle-ui-plugin-system

Note

The extensions need to be installed in cattle-ui-plugin-system namespace.

Note

After an extension is installed, Rancher Dashboard UI needs to be reloaded.

5.2.2 Installing with Fleet #

 

Installing Dashboard Extensions with Fleet requires defining a gitRepo resource which points to a Git repository with custom fleet.yaml bundle configuration file(s).

# KubeVirt extension fleet.yaml
defaultNamespace: cattle-ui-plugin-system
helm:
  releaseName: kubevirt-dashboard-extension
  chart: oci://registry.suse.com/edge/akri-dashboard-extension-chart
  version: "1.0.0"

# Akri extension fleet.yaml
defaultNamespace: cattle-ui-plugin-system
helm:
  releaseName: akri-dashboard-extension
  chart: oci://registry.suse.com/edge/akri-dashboard-extension-chart
  version: "1.0.0"

Note

The releaseName property is required and needs to match the extension name to get the extension correctly installed by ui-plugin-operator.

cat <<- EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: fleet.cattle.io/v1alpha1
metadata:
  name: edge-dashboard-extensions
  namespace: fleet-local
spec:
  repo: https://github.com/suse-edge/fleet-examples.git
  branch: main
  paths:
  - fleets/kubevirt-dashboard-extension/
  - fleets/akri-dashboard-extension/
EOF

For more information see Fleet (Chapter 6, Fleet) section and fleet-examples repository.

Once the Extensions are installed they are listed in Extensions section under Installed tabs. Since they are not installed via Apps/Marketplace, they are marked with Third-Party label.

KubeVirt Extension provides basic virtual machine management for Rancher dashboard UI. Its capabilities are described in Using KubeVirt Rancher Dashboard Extension (Section 18.7.2, “Using KubeVirt Rancher Dashboard Extension”).

Akri is a Kubernetes Resource Interface that lets you easily expose heterogeneous leaf devices (such as IP cameras and USB devices) as resources in a Kubernetes cluster, while also supporting the exposure of embedded hardware resources such as GPUs and FPGAs. Akri continually detects nodes that have access to these devices and schedules workloads based on them.

Akri Dashboard Extension allows you to use Rancher Dashboard user interface to manage and monitor leaf devices and run workloads once these devices are discovered.

Extension capabilities are further described in Akri section (Section 12.1.4, “Akri Rancher Dashboard Extension”).