For a high-availability installation of Rancher, which is recommended for production, the Rancher server is installed using a Helm chart on a Kubernetes cluster. Refer to the to choose a version of Helm to install Rancher.

For Docker installations of Rancher, which is used for development and testing, you will install Rancher as a Docker image.

The Helm chart version also applies to RancherD installs because RancherD installs the Rancher Helm chart on a Kubernetes cluster.

When installing, upgrading, or rolling back Rancher Server when it is installed on a Kubernetes cluster, Rancher server is installed using a Helm chart on a Kubernetes cluster. Therefore, as you prepare to install or upgrade a high availability Rancher configuration, you must add a Helm chart repository that contains the charts for installing Rancher.

Refer to the to choose a version of Helm to install Rancher.

Rancher provides several different Helm chart repositories to choose from. We align our latest and stable Helm chart repositories with the Docker tags that are used for a Docker installation. Therefore, the repository will contain charts for all the Rancher versions that have been tagged as rancher/rancher:latest. When a Rancher version has been promoted to the rancher/rancher:stable, it will get added to the rancher-stable repository.

Instructions on when to select these repos are available below in Switching to a Different Helm Chart Repository.

Rancher Helm chart versions match the Rancher version (i.e appVersion). Once you’ve added the repo you can search it to show available versions with the following command:
helm search repo --versions

If you have several repos you can specify the repo name, ie. helm search repo rancher-stable/rancher --versions
For more information, see

To fetch a specific version of your chosen repo, define the --version parameter like in the following example:
helm fetch rancher-stable/rancher --version=2.4.8

After installing Rancher, if you want to change which Helm chart repository to install Rancher from, you will need to follow these steps.

Latest: Recommended for trying out the newest features

Stable: Recommended for production environments

1. List the current Helm chart repositories.

2. Remove the existing Helm Chart repository that contains your charts to install Rancher, which will either be rancher-stable or rancher-latest depending on what you had initially added.

3. Continue to follow the steps to upgrade Rancher from the new Helm chart repository.

When performing , upgrades, or rollbacks, you can use tags to install a specific version of Rancher.

Rancher Server is distributed as a Docker image, which have tags attached to them. You can specify this tag when entering the command to deploy Rancher. Remember that if you use a tag without an explicit version (like or stable), you must explicitly pull a new version of that image tag. Otherwise, any image cached on the host will be used.