General

Set the container runtime for Rancher Desktop. Users have the option of containerd which provides namespaces for containers and the use of nerdctl or dockerd (moby) which enables the Docker API and the use of the Docker CLI. Only one container runtime will function at a time.

Windows

macOS

Linux

Container Engine

When switching to a different container runtime: Workloads and images that have been built or pulled using the current container runtime are not available on the container runtime being switched to.

WebAssembly (Wasm)

warning

This is an experimental setting.

The Wasm feature allows running WebAssembly application as containers, either directly with the container engine, or via Kubernetes. Details are available in the Working with WebAssembly tutorial.

warning

Note that when using the moby container engine, enabling the Wasm feature switches to a different image store, so previously built or downloaded images will not be available and must be built or downloaded again. The images are not lost; Rancher Desktop will switch back to the old image store when Wasm is disabled again.

info

If the machine has a Locked Deployment Profile installed, then the Wasm feature will be disabled and locked unless the profile uses schema version 11 or later.