Rancher Release Notes

Important

If you are using Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS), upgrading to Rancher v2.10.1 or later may cause issues with authentication, requiring manual intervention. These issues are due to the AD FS Relying Party Trust not being able to pick up a signature verification certificate from the metadata. For more information, see #48655. These issues can be corrected by either of two methods:

• Updating the Relying Party Trust information from federation metadata (Relying Party Trust → Update from Federation Metadata…​).
• Directly adding the certificate (Relying Party Trust → Properties → Signature tab → Add → Select the certificate).

Rancher v2.15.2 is the latest patch release of Rancher. This is a Community version release that introduces maintenance updates and bug fixes.

For more information on new features in the general minor release, see the v2.15.0 release notes.

Security Fixes for Vulnerabilities

This release addresses the following security issues:

Rancher

Fixed a security vulnerability in Rancher where logging out cleared the browser session cookies but did not delete the corresponding public API session token on the server. A previously captured session token therefore remained valid until its natural expiry, defeating logout as a revocation control. Only deployments using public API session tokens in, for example, OIDC-based authentication, were affected. For more information, refer to CVE-2026-88805.

Fixed a security vulnerability in Rancher where a small set of public UI settings served by unauthenticated, read-only API routes could be modified by a remote unauthenticated user. Because one of those settings is rendered as raw HTML on the login page, attacker-controlled content could be stored and executed in the browser of users accessing the login page, potentially exposing the local administrator bootstrap password or an active administrator session. The unauthenticated settings routes are now strictly read-only. For more information, see CVE-2026-88804.

Fleet

Fixed a security vulnerability in Fleet where Helm valuesFiles entries in fleet.yaml were not confined to the bundle directory. A user able to supply untrusted bundle content could cause Fleet to read files outside the repository checkout and expose their contents through the generated Bundle, including credential material the user had no permission to read. Fleet now rejects values file paths that escape the bundle directory. For more information, refer to CVE-2026-93537.

Fixed an issue where the Fleet agent copied the Secrets and ConfigMaps listed in a Bundle's downstreamResources, and created the deployment's target namespace, using the agent's own credentials instead of the ServiceAccount pinned to the deployment. Those writes are now gated by the tenant's downstream RBAC. Deployments that do not pin a ServiceAccount are unchanged as an agent operation.

Rancher v2.15.x is affected in a default installation, because the resource copy is always enabled there.

After upgrading, a deployment that pins a ServiceAccount without permission to create the target namespace, or to write the copied Secrets and ConfigMaps in it, will no longer deploy. It reports “not ready” and retries until the permission is granted. Grant the ServiceAccount the missing permissions, or pre-create the target namespace. For more information, refer to CVE-2026-88808.

Fixed a security vulnerability in Fleet's Git webhook receiver where when a webhook secret was not configured, an unauthenticated caller with network access to the webhook service could change the polling interval of GitRepo resources in any namespace, delaying the rollout of legitimate Git changes. Fleet now only applies webhook-triggered changes to GitRepo specifications for requests verified against a configured webhook secret. For more information, refer to CVE-2026-93539.

Rancher General

Major Bug Fixes

Fixed a known issue with Kubernetes v1.36 clusters where Rancher Backups is not listed under the Cluster Tools due to a Backups chart issue. See #1055.

Authentication

Major Bug Fixes

The ext.Kubeconfig store has been updated to align with standard Kubernetes API resource behavior. See #56341.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Major Bug Fixes

Fixed the reconciler loop for Global Roles that contain the inheritedFleetWorkspacePermissions field. The fix prevents Rancher logs from being spammed with create/delete operations. See #57050.

Extended Rancher to better protect its managed resources for limit ranges and resource quotas from interference by regular users.

The webhook now rejects attempts from outside of Rancher to edit these managed resources, to promote an unmanaged resource to managed, or to demote a managed resource to unmanaged, while still allowing Rancher itself full access. See #56773.

Cluster Provisioning

Major Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue where the GKE provisioning UI offered Kubernetes versions that are not supported by any GKE release channel. Rancher now shows only valid GKE versions for release-channel-based provisioning, preventing users from selecting versions that cannot be used to provision new clusters. See #18928 and #56879.

Known Issues

There is a known issue with provisioned clusters deletion where such clusters get stuck if they have s3 snapshots. A workaround is to delete all left over s3 etcdsnapshots.rke.cattle.io objects belonging to the cluster that are present within the local cluster. See #57506 and the issue comment for more information.

Changes Since v2.15.1

See the full list of changes.

Install/Upgrade Notes

If you’re installing Rancher for the first time, your environment must fulfill the installation requirements.

Important

Rancher now requires the cluster it runs on to have the Kubernetes API Aggregation Layer enabled. This is because Rancher extends Kubernetes with additional APIs by registering its own extension API server. Please note that all versions of Kubernetes supported in this Rancher versions K8s distributions (RKE2/K3s) will have the aggregation layer configured and enabled by default.

Refer to the Extension API Server documentation and #50400 for more information.

Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE/RKE1) has reached end of life as of July 31, 2025. Rancher versions 2.12.0 and later no longer support provisioning or managing downstream RKE1 clusters. We recommend replatforming RKE1 clusters to RKE2 to ensure continued support and security updates. Learn more about the transition here.

Rancher now has a pre-upgrade validation check for RKE1 resources which fails and lists the RKE1 resources if present. Refer to #50286 for more information.

It is crucial that you review the available disk space on your nodes and plan accordingly before upgrading to Rancher v2.12.0 and later to avoid potential disk pressure and pod eviction issues.

For additional information, refer to the UI Server Side Pagination - Disk Space documentation.

Rancher now has an enablement option called AUDIT_LOG_ENABLED for API Audit Logs for a Rancher installation.

In Rancher versions 2.11.x and earlier, only the AUDIT_LEVEL could be set and the default log level (0) would disable the audit log. In Rancher versions 2.12.x and later, the default log level (0) now only contains the log request and response metadata, and can be set when configuring AUDIT_LOG_ENABLED. If installing or upgrading via Helm you can enable the API Audit Logs and specify the log level by applying the following setting to your Helm command: --set auditLog.enabled=true --set auditLog.level=0. See the Enabling the API Audit Log to Record System Events documentation and #48941.

Changes in Image Artifacts

Image artifact digests are renamed in Rancher v2.12.0, v2.11.4 and v2.10.8. Up until this change, separate image digests files for each operating system and architecture have been maintained for compatibility reasons. With this change, only one file for each operating system is to be provided:

• The rancher-images-digests-linux-amd64.txt and rancher-images-digests-linux-arm64.txt files are to be renamed to rancher-images-digests-linux.txt.
• The rancher-images-digests-windows-ltsc2019.txt and rancher-images-digests-windows-ltsc2022.txt files are to be renamed to rancher-images-digests-windows.txt.

Upgrade Requirements

Creating backups: Create a backup before you upgrade Rancher. To roll back Rancher after an upgrade, you must first back up and restore Rancher to the previous Rancher version. Because Rancher will be restored to the same state as when the backup was created, any changes post-upgrade will not be included after the restore.

Helm version requirements:

• To manage Rancher 2.12.x and later, you must upgrade your Helm client to version 3.18 or newer.
• This change is required to reflect the addition of Kubernetes 1.33 support with this release.
• Currently, the official Helm Version Support Policy dictates that only Helm 3.18 supports the proper Kubernetes version range for Rancher 2.12.

CNI requirements:

• For Kubernetes v1.19 and later, disable firewalld as it’s incompatible with various CNI plugins. See #28840.
• When upgrading or installing a Linux distribution that uses nf_tables as the backend packet filter, such as SLES 15, RHEL 8, Ubuntu 20.10, Debian 10, or later, upgrade to RKE v1.19.2 or later to get Flannel v0.13.0. Flannel v0.13.0 supports nf_tables. See Flannel #1317.

Requirements for air-gapped environments:

• When using a proxy in front of an air-gapped Rancher instance, you must pass additional parameters to NO_PROXY. See the documentation and issue #2725.
• When installing Rancher with Docker in an air-gapped environment, you must supply a custom registries.yaml file to the docker run command, as shown in the K3s documentation. If the registry has certificates, then you’ll also need to supply those. See #28969.

Versions

Images

rancher/rancher:v2.15.2

Tools

CLI - v2.15.2

Kubernetes Versions for RKE2/K3s

v1.36.4 (Default)

v1.35.8

v1.34.11

Rancher Helm Chart Versions

In Rancher v2.6.0 and later, in the Apps & Marketplace UI, many Rancher Helm charts are named with a major version that starts with 100. This avoids simultaneous upstream changes and Rancher changes from causing conflicting version increments. This also complies with semantic versioning (SemVer), which is a requirement for Helm. You can see the upstream version number of a chart in the build metadata, for example: 100.0.0+up2.1.0. See #32294.

Previous Rancher Behavior Changes

Previous Rancher Behavior Changes - Rancher General

Rancher v2.15.0:

Rancher v2.15 removes support for Kubernetes v1.33. See #55306.

Previous Rancher Behavior Changes Changes - Rancher App (Global UI)

Rancher v2.15.0:

The option to disable the feature flag ui-sql-cache / Vai / Server-Side Pagination (SSP) in the Rancher UI has been removed in preparation for Rancher v2.16, where the feature will always be enabled. See #16822.

Removal: Support for Ember-based UI plugins for cluster and node drivers (deprecated since Rancher v2.11.0) is removed in Rancher v2.15.0. Migrate your plugins to the UI Extensions Framework. For details, see #14005.

Previous Rancher Behavior Changes - K3s and RKE2 Provision

Rancher v2.15.0:

By default, the Standard User and Create Clusters global permissions now allow creating and then updating CAPI infrastructure objects in the fleet-default namespace. Note that manually created infrastructure provider identity objects, such as AWSClusterStaticIdentity or VSphereClusterIdentity, that target the fleet-default namespace can be used through CAPI infrastructure objects such as AWSCluster or VsphereCluster. See #53777.

When using native CAPI infrastructure providers with v2prov, Rancher will now generate the bootstrap cloud-config in the Jinja format. User-data for regular node drivers with v2prov is unaffected. See #53777.

Previous Rancher Behavior Changes - Continuous Delivery (Fleet)

Rancher v2.15.0:

Deprecation: Fleet will be removing support for GitRepoRestriction in a future release, making the use of the Policy resource for configuring multi-tenant environments the only option. See #55652.

Deprecation: Fleet support for unauthenticated webhook calls will be removed in a future release, making the setup of a webhook secret the only option. See #55633.

Long-standing Known Issues

Long-standing Known Issues - Cluster Provisioning

Rancher v2.15.1:

Creating or editing v2prov clusters with native CAPI infrastructure providers from the UI can under some failure conditions leave unused infrastructure resources in the management cluster that must be cleaned up manually. See #55705.

Not all cluster tools can be installed on a hardened cluster.

Rancher v2.8.1:

When you attempt to register a new etcd/controlplane node in a CAPR-managed cluster after a failed etcd snapshot restoration, the node can become stuck in a perpetual paused state, displaying the error message [ERROR] 000 received while downloading Rancher connection information. Sleeping for 5 seconds and trying again. As a workaround, you can unpause the cluster by running kubectl edit clusters.cluster clustername -n fleet-default and set spec.unpaused to false. See #43735.

Long-standing Known Issues - RKE2 Provisioning

Rancher v2.7.7:

Due to the backoff logic in various components, downstream provisioned K3s and RKE2 clusters may take longer to re-achieve Active status after a migration. If you see that a downstream cluster is still updating or in an error state immediately after a migration, please let it attempt to resolve itself. This might take up to an hour to complete. See #34518 and #42834.

Rancher v2.7.6:

Provisioning RKE2/K3s clusters with added (not built-in) custom node drivers causes provisioning to fail. As a workaround, fix the added node drivers after activating. See #37074.

Long-standing Known Issues - K3s Provisioning

Rancher v2.7.6:

Provisioning RKE2/K3s clusters with added (not built-in) custom node drivers causes provisioning to fail. As a workaround, fix the added node drivers after activating. See #37074.

Rancher v2.7.2:

Clusters remain in an Updating state even when they contain nodes in an Error state. See #39164.

Long-standing Known Issues - Rancher App (Global UI)

Rancher v2.10.0:

After deleting a Namespace or Project in the Rancher UI, the Namespace or Project remains visible. As a workaround, refresh the page. See #12220.

Rancher v2.9.2:

Although system mode node pools must have at least one node, the Rancher UI allows a minimum node count of zero. Inputting a zero minimum node count through the UI can cause cluster creation to fail due to an invalid parameter error. To prevent this error from occurring, enter a minimum node count at least equal to the node count. See #11922.

Rancher v2.7.7:

When creating a cluster in the Rancher UI it does not allow the use of an underscore _ in the Cluster Name field. See #9416.

Rancher v2.6.4:

Deployment securityContext section is missing when a new workload is created. This prevents pods from starting when Pod Security Policy Support is enabled. See #4815.

Long-standing Known Issues - EKS

Rancher v2.7.0:

EKS clusters on Kubernetes v1.21 or below on Rancher v2.7 cannot be upgraded. See #39392.

Long-standing Known Issues - Authentication

Rancher v2.9.0:

There are some known issues with the OpenID Connect provider support:

• When the generic OIDC auth provider is enabled, and you attempt to add auth provider users to a cluster or project, users are not populated in the dropdown search bar. This is expected behavior as the OIDC auth provider alone is not searchable. See #46104.
• When the generic OIDC auth provider is enabled, auth provider users that are added to a cluster/project by their username are not able to access resources upon logging in. A user will only have access to resources upon login if the user is added by their userID. See #46105.
• When the generic OIDC auth provider is enabled and an auth provider user in a nested group is logged into Rancher, the user will see the following error when they attempt to create a Project: projectroletemplatebindings.management.cattle.io is forbidden: User "u-gcxatwsnku" cannot create resource "projectroletemplatebindings" in API group "management.cattle.io" in the namespace "p-9t5pg". However, the project is still created. See #46106.

Long-standing Known Issues - Rancher Webhook

Rancher v2.7.2:

A webhook is installed in all downstream clusters. There are several issues that users may encounter with this functionality:

• If you rollback from a version of Rancher v2.7.2 or later, to a Rancher version earlier than v2.7.2, the webhooks will remain in downstream clusters. Since the webhook is designed to be 1:1 compatible with specific versions of Rancher, this can cause unexpected behaviors to occur downstream. The Rancher team has developed a script which should be used after rollback is complete (meaning after a Rancher version earlier than v2.7.2 is running). This removes the webhook from affected downstream clusters. See #40816.

Long-standing Known Issues - Virtualization Management (Harvester)

Rancher v2.13.1:

When upgrading to Rancher v2.13.1 or higher while using Harvester v1.6.1, users may encounter an issue with their Load Balancers in downstream clusters using the Harvester Cloud Provider, and must perform the following workaround to instruct Calico to not use any of the IP/interface managed by kube-vip. See #9767.

Rancher v2.7.2:

If you’re using Rancher v2.7.2 with Harvester v1.1.1 clusters, you won’t be able to select the Harvester cloud provider when deploying or updating guest clusters. The Harvester release notes contain instructions on how to resolve this. See #3750.

Long-standing Known Issues - Backup/Restore

When migrating to a cluster with the Rancher Backup feature, the server-url cannot be changed to a different location. It must continue to use the same URL.

Rancher v2.13.0:

When performing a rollback from Rancher v2.13.0 to v2.12.3 using the backup and restore operator (BRO), the restore does not complete successfully. See #844. To work around this issue, you must scale down your Rancher deployment and uninstall the Webhook chart before performing the restore. For details, refer to this Knowledge Base article.

Rancher v2.7.7:

Due to the backoff logic in various components, downstream provisioned K3s and RKE2 clusters may take longer to re-achieve Active status after a migration. If you see that a downstream cluster is still updating or in an error state immediately after a migration, please let it attempt to resolve itself. This might take up to an hour to complete. See #34518 and #42834.

Original source

Images with -rc

rancher/rancher-agent:v2.15.2-rc1
rancher/rancher:v2.15.2-rc1

Components with -rc

DASHBOARD_UI_VERSION v2.15.2-rc1

Min version components with -rc

Chart/KDM sources

CHART_DEFAULT_BRANCH: release-v2.15 (scripts/package-env)
CHART_DEFAULT_BRANCH: release-v2.15 (package/Dockerfile)
CATTLE_KDM_BRANCH: release-v2.15 (package/Dockerfile)
CATTLE_KDM_BRANCH: release-v2.15 (Dockerfile.runtime)
KDMBranch: release-v2.15 (pkg/settings/setting.go)
ChartDefaultBranch: release-v2.15 (pkg/settings/setting.go)

Original source

Images with -rc

rancher/prometheus-federator:v7.0.1-rc.1
rancher/rancher-agent:v2.15.1-rc1
rancher/rancher:v2.15.1-rc1

Components with -rc

Min version components with -rc

Chart/KDM sources

CHART_DEFAULT_BRANCH: dev-v2.15 (scripts/package-env)
CHART_DEFAULT_BRANCH: dev-v2.15 (package/Dockerfile)
CATTLE_KDM_BRANCH: release-v2.15 (package/Dockerfile)
CATTLE_KDM_BRANCH: release-v2.15 (Dockerfile.runtime)
KDMBranch: release-v2.15 (pkg/settings/setting.go)
ChartDefaultBranch: dev-v2.15 (pkg/settings/setting.go)

Original source

Images with -rc

rancher/rancher-agent:v2.15.1-alpha1

rancher/rancher-webhook:v0.11.1-rc.1

rancher/rancher:v2.15.1-alpha1

Components with -rc

ALI-OPERATOR v1.15.0-rc.3

WRANGLER

Min version components with -rc

Chart/KDM sources

CHART_DEFAULT_BRANCH: dev-v2.15 (scripts/package-env)

CHART_DEFAULT_BRANCH: dev-v2.15 (package/Dockerfile)

CATTLE_KDM_BRANCH: dev-v2.15 (package/Dockerfile)

CATTLE_KDM_BRANCH: dev-v2.15 (Dockerfile.runtime)

KDMBranch: dev-v2.15 (pkg/settings/setting.go)

ChartDefaultBranch: dev-v2.15 (pkg/settings/setting.go)

Original source