[Question] How to use custom distro?

[thetredev]

Hi,

say I built a distro from this repo myself, how would I tell Rancher Desktop to use it insead of the official release?

Thanks!

[jandubois]

When you run yarn to install the prerequisites of Rancher Desktop, it will download the wsl-distro tarball to some location under resources/win32/wsl-distro*. You should be able to replace the tarball at that time before running Rancher Desktop with yarn dev, or before packaging it.

Note that this is of course not supported ("you break it, you keep all the pieces" etc).

I'm curious though what kind of modifications you would want to make, and why.

Note that you can also run rdctl shell and then modify the distro as you need to. The changes will persist across restarts, but will of course be wiped out by a factory reset.

[thetredev]

Awesome, thanks! I just want to play around a bit and see if and how Rancher Desktop works with a systemd-based WSL distro.

[jandubois]

see if and how Rancher Desktop works with a systemd-based WSL distro.

This is not going to work; Rancher Desktop is currently pretty coupled to OpenRC. It uses custom /etc/init.d scripts and "manually" manages services with rc-service.

Feel free to look around, but be prepared to spend a couple of weeks modifying the Rancher Desktop backend itself before you can get this working.

[mook-as]

Things to watch out for if you're trying to do systemd:

• You may or may not need systemd 255.7+ due to issues with cgroup namespaces in WSL.
• We do the setup normally, but we run most services (dockerd/containerd, k3s, etc.) inside a network namespace; see https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/blob/main/pkg/rancher-desktop/assets/scripts/wsl-init-rd-networking for something to get started with. This is because dockerd/containerd/k3s tends to do fun things to iptables etc. and doesn't clean up properly, so restarting Rancher Desktop leads to issues. Look into JoinsNamespaceOf= in systemd.unit.
• It might be good to make RD start a non-default .target for all the services once setup is complete.

[thetredev]

Thank you both. Very intersting! I'll take my time :D