Overview
What is Rancher Turtles?
The Cluster API Extension for Rancher, also known as Rancher Turtles, is a Kubernetes Operator that provides integration between Rancher Manager and Cluster API (CAPI) with the aim of bringing full CAPI support to Rancher.
With Rancher Turtles, you can:
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Automatically import CAPI clusters into Rancher, by installing the Rancher Cluster Agent in CAPI provisioned clusters.
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Implement a GitOps-native workflow to managing Kubernetes clusters in Rancher.
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Simplified management of CAPI Providers using the CAPI Operator.

Navigate the Documentation
To make it easier to get started with Rancher Turtles, we have structured the documentation to guide you naturally from basic concepts to advanced features. We recommend following along step by step, but if you are already familiar with certain topics, feel free to skip ahead to the relevant sections.
Tutorials
If this is your first time using Rancher Turtles and you want to get started quickly, we recommend you start here. This will guide you through the process of getting your environment ready for installing Rancher Turtles, using CAPI to provision a new workload cluster and importing it into Rancher.
Reference
Understand the architecture of Rancher Turtles, the features, the concept of Certified Providers
and the core concepts of the operator’s features.
User Guide
Learn how to use Rancher Turtles to manage your CAPI clusters with Rancher, and use more advanced features like ClusterClass
.
Operator Guide
You may want to dive into more advanced maintenance tasks, like customizing your Rancher Turtles installation, e.g. configuring Rancher Turtles for more advanced scenarios like air-gapped environments, how to install and manage CAPI Providers or certifying the provider of your choice.
Developer Guide
If you are interested in contributing to Rancher Turtles, this section will guide you through the process of setting up your development environment and understanding the guidelines for contributing.
Security
Rancher Turtles meets SLSA Level 3 requirements by running builds on a hardened platform with consistent build processes and provenance distribution. This section contains more details on security-related topics.
Release Notes
Stay up to date with the latest changes, bug fixes and new features in Rancher Turtles here.