Easily login to Rancher containers locally

Sometimes managing containers through the Rancher web console can be tedious and painful.  Especially if you need to copy/paste things into or out of the terminal.  I recently discovered a nice little project on Github called Rancher SSH which allows you to connect to a container running in your Rancher environment as if it was local to the machine you are working on, much like SSH and hence the name.

I am still playing around with the functionality but so far it has been very nice and is very easy to get started with.  To get started you can either install it via Homebrew or with Golang.  I chose to use the homebrew option.

brew install fangli/dev/rancherssh

After it is finished installing (it might take a minute or two), you should have access to the rancherssh command from the CLI.  You might need to source your shell in order to pick up tab completion for the command but you should be able to run the command and get some output.

rancherssh

In order to do anything useful with this tool, you will first need to create an API key for rancherssh in Rancher.  Navigate to the environment you’d like to create the key for and then click the API tab in Rancher.  Then click  the “Add Environment API Key” to bring up the dialogue to create a new key.

After you create your key make not of the Access key (username)  and Secret key (password).  You will need these to configure rancherssh in the step below.  First, create a file somewhere that is easy to remember, called config.yml and populate it, similar to the following, updating the endpoint, access key and secret key.

endpoint: https://your.rancher.server/v1
user: access_key
password: secret_key

That’s pretty much it.  Make sure the endpoint matches your environment correctly, otherwise you should now be able to connect to a container in your Rancher environment.  You’ll need to make sure you run the rancherssh command from the same directory that you configured your config.yml file, but otherwise it should just work.

rancherssh my-stack_container_1

Optionally you can provide all of the configuration information to the CLI and just skip the config file completely.

rancherssh --endpoint="https://your.rancher.server/v1" --user="access_key" --password="secret_key" my-test-container_1

There is one last thing to mention.  rancherssh provides a nice fuzzy matching mechanism for connecting to containers.  For example, if you can’t remember which containers are available to a stack in Rancher you can run a pattern to match the stack, and rancherssh will tell you which containers are running in the stack and allow you to choose which one to connect to.

ranchserssh %my-stack%

If there are multiple containers this command will allow you to pick which one to connect to.

Searching for container %my-stack%
We found more than one containers in system:
[1] my-stack_container_1, Container ID 1i91308 in project 1a216, IP Address 10.42.154.115
[2] my-stack_container_2, Container ID 1i94034 in project 1a216, IP Address 10.42.119.103
[3] my-stack_container_3, Container ID 1i94036 in project 1a216, IP Address 10.42.146.57

I didn’t have any issues at all getting started with this tool, I would definitely recommend checking it out.  Especially if you do a lot of work in your Rancher containers.  It is fast, easy to use and is really useful for the times that using the Rancher UI is too cumbersome.