Rancher Desktop (Windows) - Domain & Namespace Mapping

[maxsargentdev]

Hi there,

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I have been experimenting with rancher desktop as a replacement for docker desktop, I am really impressed with rancher desktop. I have experienced a fair amount of pain using docker desktop to run K8s clusters locally on windows so its refreshing to use.

Anyway, part of my old setup involved running a dnsmasq container (separate from the local cluster) on my local machine and allowing it to redirect requests to certain domains back to localhost, by providing a similar config to this for dnsmasq:

address=/.my-namespace-1/.my-namespace-2/127.0.0.1

Then I could hit my services running locally from outside the cluster via say https://my-service-a.my-namespace-1, via an ingress.

This was really nice as this aligned my configuration when moving the service inside the cluster, it can communicate with another service using the same config inside as I use outside, as the domains in dnsmasq match the namespaces.

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I tried to achieve this with rancher-desktop and havent had much luck, does anyone have an idea about how such a thing could be done?

Things I have tried:

• Switching rancher back to running in dnsmasq mode, then using an init script to load in my config to dnsmasq. Then In windows I would point to my wsl interface for dns resolution and dnsmasq would redirect. This worked but very intermittently.
• Running a container outside the cluster and pointing to localhost, this is what I used to do in docker desktop , this doesnt work now as the host-resolver processes take use port 53.

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To be honest I am not sure if any of this is even the right thing to be doing, but it does make for quite a nice experience when everything is working.