rancher-ai-ui

The Rancher AI UI extension adds an AI-powered chat assistant directly into the Rancher Dashboard.

It helps users interact with clusters and workloads using conversational queries and suggested actions — improving discoverability, troubleshooting, and automation.

It also adds direct links in the Rancher UI to the Chat, available on resource lists, resource detail pages and the global navigation — making it quick to start a conversation about any cluster object or action.

Key features

• Conversational assistant integrated into Rancher UI
• Actionable suggestions and templates to speed common workflows
• Support for configurable LLM backends (local or remote)

Running for Development

This is what you probably want to get started.

# Install dependencies
yarn install

# For development, serve with hot reload at https://localhost:8005
# using the endpoint for your Rancher API
API=https://your-rancher yarn dev
# or put the variable into a .env file
# Goto https://localhost:8005

Updating @shell package

This is about updating the @shell package which is the base from rancher/dashboard

# Update
yarn create @rancher/update

Building the extension for production

Bump the app version on package.json file, then run:

# Build for production
./scripts/publish -g 
# add flag -f if you need to overwrite an existing version


# If you need to test the built extension
yarn serve-pkgs

E2E tests

Install AI Agent chart

This will install the AI Agent Helm chart into your Kubernetes cluster. The LLM is configured to use a mock service for testing purposes.

./.github/scripts/deploy-rancher-ai.sh $YOUR_KUBECONFIG_PATH

Launch UI in dev mode

API=https://your-rancher yarn dev

Launch Cypress

# Launch Cypress dashboard - interactive mode
TEST_SKIP=setup TEST_PASSWORD=${rancher-password} yarn cypress:open

# Run Cypress tests in background
TEST_SKIP=setup TEST_PASSWORD=${rancher-password} yarn cypress:run

Environment variables

• API, the address of your Rancher instance.
• TEST_USERNAME, default admin.
• TEST_PASSWORD, user password or custom during first Rancher run.
• CATTLE_BOOTSTRAP_PASSWORD, initialization password.
• TEST_BASE_URL, Rancher UI dev URL, default https://localhost:8005.
• TEST_SKIP=setup, avoid to execute bootstrap setup tests for already initialized Rancher instances, it has to be toggled in case of new instances

License

Check Rancher AI UI Apache License details here