Clean Install Rancher Desktop

With any open-source project Rancher Desktop sometimes has some hiccups. We should expect this, and as the engineers address these issues. There could be a gap in the features or functionality that puts the app in an unrecoverable state. This happened to me recently. Rancher Desktop restarted Kubernetes and everything hung and didn’t work.

Deleted the app from my Mac. Tried a different version of Rancher Desktop. Thinking my recent upgrade was the issue. Come to find out the version wasn’t the issue. Something went wrong and no matter what I tried Rancher Desktop wasn’t working. At the time I didn’t care why it wasn’t working. I needed to demo something else and I couldn’t get it to work.

I got a moment to sit with one of the engineers to get past this. So, if Rancher Desktop ever gets to a state where it’s stuck here is how to fix it.

Remove the App

Go in the Applications directory and delete the app.

Remove Supporting files

~/Library/rancher-desktop
~/Library/Logs/rancher-desktop
~/Library/Preferences/rancher-desktop
~/Library/Application Support/Caches/rancher-desktop-updater
~/Library/Application Support/rancher-desktop

Reinstall

Reinstall the version of Rancher Desktop you want to use.

This should clear up any issues with using Rancher Desktop. Giving you a clear up any issue that you might run in to.