Deploy RKE2 without Rancher

I was wondering if there was a way to run RKE2 without Rancher to manage it? Basically we are deploying a 2xk8mst nodes + 2xk8worker nodes in which our cluster would be running. However we are not wanting to deploy rancher to manage the cluster, we rather manage the cluster from out local host via kubectl. How does one extract the user specifc kubeconfig for a cluster without rancher? I want to copy the kubeconfig onto my local devVM and manage the cluster. I hope I am not barking up the wrong tree. Is this even possible or is rancher a hard requirement?

Hello, yes you can, we are actually doing it in my company. The documentation is here: Installation Methods - RKE2 - Rancher's Next Generation Kubernetes Distribution. But the drawback is it becomes very complicated to customize it to your need without going in-depth into the tool (it’s even worse when you need to recover things after crashes). Hope it helps you.