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I just posted in your previous thread - you should test with hauler - I do exactly what you are describing, only grab what is required and store in my registry you can use hauler to "derive the minimal required image set per Rancher + RKE2 version combination" https://docs.hauler.dev/docs/hauler-usage/store/sync https://docs.hauler.dev/docs/guides-references/hauler-manifests

Thanks, that aligns with my understanding as well 👍 What I’m trying to clarify is how you determined which artifacts are actually required to push into the private registry. The rancher-images.txt and rke2-images.txt files list a large superset of images, and I’m finding it difficult to decide what should be included vs excluded for a given setup. Specifically, I’m looking for the criteria or process you used to arrive at a minimal required image set for a particular Rancher version and RKE2/Kubernetes version, rather than mirroring everything listed in those files. Any insight into how you filtered or validated the required images would be really helpful.

Hi Sanjeeth, You of course can do as dc.901 is saying and generate a list by fetching existing cluster with hauler to create manifest. But you can also do that from just the available data in the GH Repos for example bootstrapping. This is what I use in my lab for airgapped scenarios: The key is to fetch the compatible rke2/k3s version from the https://github.com/rancher/kontainer-driver-metadata/blob/release-v2.13/data/data.json. The JSON has top-level keys

k3s

,

rke2

,

rke

. Each has a

releases

array. One entry looks like:

{
  "version": "v1.32.11+rke2r3",
  "minChannelServerVersion": "v2.12.0",
  "maxChannelServerVersion": "v2.13.99"
}

After I have selected the rke2/k3s versions to install you can fetch the image lists for these specifc versions (which is far less) For example: https://github.com/rancher/rke2/releases/download/v1.32.11%2Brke2r3/rke2-images-all.linux-amd64.txt What I then do is further split this down cni/lb/providers etc. (I have some regex for that). Im still developing but it works for me 😉 For AddOn-Charts see: https://github.com/rancher/charts/blob/release-v2.13/index.yaml Each Version has a annotation which rancher versions it supports: catalog.cattle.io/rancher-version: '>= 2.13.0-0 < 2.14.0-0'. This can be used in automations. Note this is my lab setup!