rancher-system-agent is a daemon designed to run on a system and apply "plans" to the system. rancher-system-agent can support both local and remote plans, and was built to be integrated with the Rancher2 project for provisioning next-generation, CAPI driven clusters.
mainis the primary development branch and always contains the latest changes.- Tags from
mainare consumed by Rancher'smainbranch. - Each Rancher release line has a corresponding
release/vX.Ybranch, created frommain. - Release branches only receive bug fixes and security patches.
- Release branch tags increment only the patch suffix (
.x). - Release candidates (RCs) may also be created from release branches before a stable release.
- Release candidates (RCs) tag format is
vX.Y.Z-rc.MwhereMis incremented for each new RC.
Starting with releases after v0.3.16, system-agent minor versions are aligned with Rancher minor release lines:
| System-agent Branch | Rancher Release Line | Tag Format |
|---|---|---|
main |
main |
vX.Y.Z |
release/v2.15 |
v2.15 |
v0.15.x |
release/v2.14 |
v2.14 |
v0.14.x |
release/v2.13 |
v2.13 |
v0.13.x |
Note: The v0.3.x release line uses the legacy versioning scheme and is not aligned with Rancher release lines. v0.3.16 is the final release in that series.
make
You can also
CROSS=true make if you want cross-compiled binaries for Darwin/Windows.
First, configure the agent by looking at the examples/configuration folder, then you can run the binary.
./bin/rancher-system-agent
Copyright (c) 2026 Rancher Labs, Inc.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.