Does the Web UI have any kind of plugin support?

Rancher 1.x
1

Is there any way to add context-sensitive links?

The specific use case I have in mind is fat containers. While the general view is to do single process containers, in the real world there are plenty of multi-process containers. This naturally implies some form of process manager, like supervisord, see https://docs.docker.com/articles/using_supervisord/

supervisord has a Web interface, and several multi-process Web interfaces. But most require manually configuring the list of hosts to manage remotely.

In that kind of environment, especially with dynamically allocated IPs, there is no way to have a multi-node supervisord Web UI able to know about all of the containers in which it is running.

On the other hand, if it were possible to have a plugin so that I can configure my Rancher interface to have a link that opens a new window/tab/popup wherein I get my supervisord UI directly from the container, that would be a real killer for fat containers.

For now, we are OK, as our container IPs and hostnames are static. But eventually it will be necessary.

2

There is not currently a general-purpose plugin system… I think having easy links to the exposed ports on hosts would be useful in general though.

You could also potentially setup a multi-host aware UI and dynamically generate its config file with a list of all the hosts/containers through service-discovery (DNS) or the API.

3

I didn’t think there was. I am sort of thinking much further ahead. But given the dynamic nature of containers, combined with the unique needs to manage each one (what I do and the tools I use are unlikely to be the same as the ones you use), having a relatively easy structure would be beneficial. Even something as simple as a place where one can put fixed html and a link whose path is filled based on properties of the container would go a long way. More importantly, it would open up people to ideas as to how to use it.