an invention by rweir
Project Description
Rancher Upgrader helps the user upgrade their rancher install and walks them through all need-to-know release notes.
Why? After reviewing customer issues a pattern was observed, serious changes, deprecations, and bugs are not being communicated to the user. Rancher Upgrader is intended to not only upgrade rancher, but inform the user. Release notes can be intimidating. Critical information can feel hidden among interesting but less-important release notes. Whether someone has the habit to navigate to a release page and read release notes prior to upgrading is outside our control.
Rancher-upgrade will also enforce a proper upgrade path, where a user must upgrade from version v2.x.y to the latest patch of v2.x before upgrade to a new minor. Then they can only upgrade to the latest minor.
Goal for this Hackweek
Create a CLI that can upgrade rancher from one version to another while walking the user through relevant release notes.
Resources
This project is part of:
Hack Week 23
Activity
Comments
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A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied
Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.
Project Description
Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as:
harvester vm create my-vm --count 5
to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.
Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.
Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli
Done in previous Hackweeks
- Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
- Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE
Goal for this Hackweek
The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.
Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it
Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues
Resources
The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact).
Welcome contributions are:
- Testing it and creating issues
- Documentation
- Go code improvement
What you might learn
Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:
- GitHub Actions
- Harvester as a SUSE Product
- Go programming language
- Kubernetes API
- Kubevirt API objects (Manipulating VMs and VM Configuration in Kubernetes using Kubevirt)
Rewrite Distrobox in go (POC) by fabriziosestito
Description
Rewriting Distrobox in Go.
Main benefits:
- Easier to maintain and to test
- Adapter pattern for different container backends (LXC, systemd-nspawn, etc.)
Goals
- Build a minimal starting point with core commands
- Keep the CLI interface compatible: existing users shouldn't notice any difference
- Use a clean Go architecture with adapters for different container backends
- Keep dependencies minimal and binary size small
- Benchmark against the original shell script
Resources
- Upstream project: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/
- Distrobox site: https://distrobox.it/
- ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox
Create a Cloud-Native policy engine with notifying capabilities to optimize resource usage by gbazzotti
Description
The goal of this project is to begin the initial phase of development of an all-in-one Cloud-Native Policy Engine that notifies resource owners when their resources infringe predetermined policies. This was inspired by a current issue in the CES-SRE Team where other solutions seemed to not exactly correspond to the needs of the specific workloads running on the Public Cloud Team space.
The initial architecture can be checked out on the Repository listed under Resources.
Among the features that will differ this project from other monitoring/notification systems:
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- Easy account management, being able to parse all required configuration by a single JSON file
- Eliminate integrations by not requiring metrics to go through a data-agreggator
Goals
- Create a minimal working prototype following the workflow specified on the documentation
- Provide instructions on installation/usage
- Work on email notifying capabilities
Resources
Rewrite Distrobox in go (POC) by fabriziosestito
Description
Rewriting Distrobox in Go.
Main benefits:
- Easier to maintain and to test
- Adapter pattern for different container backends (LXC, systemd-nspawn, etc.)
Goals
- Build a minimal starting point with core commands
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- Use a clean Go architecture with adapters for different container backends
- Keep dependencies minimal and binary size small
- Benchmark against the original shell script
Resources
- Upstream project: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/
- Distrobox site: https://distrobox.it/
- ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox
Contribute to terraform-provider-libvirt by pinvernizzi
Description
The SUSE Manager (SUMA) teams' main tool for infrastructure automation, Sumaform, largely relies on terraform-provider-libvirt. That provider is also widely used by other teams, both inside and outside SUSE.
It would be good to help the maintainers of this project and give back to the community around it, after all the amazing work that has been already done.
If you're interested in any of infrastructure automation, Terraform, virtualization, tooling development, Go (...) it is also a good chance to learn a bit about them all by putting your hands on an interesting, real-use-case and complex project.
Goals
- Get more familiar with Terraform provider development and libvirt bindings in Go
- Solve some issues and/or implement some features
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Resources
- CONTRIBUTING readme
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- "Good first issue" list
Updatecli Autodiscovery supporting WASM plugins by olblak
Description
Updatecli is a Golang Update policy engine that allow to write Update policies in YAML manifest. Updatecli already has a plugin ecosystem for common update strategies such as automating Dockerfile or Kubernetes manifest from Git repositories.
This is what we call autodiscovery where Updatecli generate manifest and apply them dynamically based on some context.
Obviously, the Updatecli project doesn't accept plugins specific to an organization.
I saw project using different languages such as python, C#, or JS to generate those manifest.
It would be great to be able to share and reuse those specific plugins
During the HackWeek, I'll hang on the Updatecli matrix channel
https://matrix.to/#/#Updatecli_community:gitter.im
Goals
Implement autodiscovery plugins using WASM. I am planning to experiment with https://github.com/extism/extism
To build a simple WASM autodiscovery plugin and run it from Updatecli
Resources
- https://github.com/extism/extism
- https://github.com/updatecli/updatecli
- https://www.updatecli.io/docs/core/autodiscovery/
- https://matrix.to/#/#Updatecli_community:gitter.im
Q2Boot - A handy QEMU VM launcher by amanzini
Description
Q2Boot (Qemu Quick Boot) is a command-line tool that wraps QEMU to provide a streamlined experience for launching virtual machines. It automatically configures common settings like KVM acceleration, virtio drivers, and networking while allowing customization through both configuration files and command-line options.
The project originally was a personal utility in D, now recently rewritten in idiomatic Go. It lives at repository https://github.com/ilmanzo/q2boot
Goals
Improve the project, testing with different scenarios , address issues and propose new features. It will benefit of some basic integration testing by providing small sample disk images.
Updates
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- Dec 2, 2025 : added external monitor via telnet option
- Dec 4, 2025 : released v0.0.3 with architecture auto-detection
- Dec 5, 2025 : filing new issues and general polishment. Designing E2E testing
Resources
Play with the userfaultfd(2) system call and download on demand using HTTP Range Requests with Golang by rbranco
Description
The userfaultfd(2) is a cool system call to handle page faults in user-space. This should allow me to list the contents of an ISO or similar archive without downloading the whole thing. The userfaultfd(2) part can also be done in theory with the PROT_NONE mprotect + SIGSEGV trick, for complete Unix portability, though reportedly being slower.
Goals
- Create my own library for userfaultfd(2) in Golang.
- Create my own library for HTTP Range Requests.
- Complete portability with Unix.
- Benchmarks.
- Contribute some tests to LTP.
Resources
- https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.html
- https://www.cons.org/cracauer/cracauer-userfaultfd.html
HTTP API for nftables by crameleon
Background
The idea originated in https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/164060 and is about building RESTful API which translates authorized HTTP requests to operations in nftables, possibly utilizing libnftables-json(5).
Originally, I started developing such an interface in Go, utilizing https://github.com/google/nftables. The conversion of string networks to nftables set elements was problematic (unfortunately no record of details), and I started a second attempt in Python, which made interaction much simpler thanks to native nftables Python bindings.
Goals
- Find and track the issue with google/nftables
- Revisit and polish the Go or Python code (prefer Go, but possibly depends on implementing missing functionality), primarily the server component
- Finish functionality to interact with nftables sets (retrieving and updating elements), which are of interest for the originating issue
- Align test suite
- Packaging
Resources
- https://git.netfilter.org/nftables/tree/py/src/nftables.py
- https://git.com.de/Georg/nftables-http-api (to be moved to GitHub)
- https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:crameleon:containers/pytest-nftables-container
Results
- Started new https://github.com/tacerus/nftables-http-api.
- First Go nftables issue was related to set elements needing to be added with different start and end addresses - coincidentally, this was recently discovered by someone else, who added a useful helper function for this: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/342.
- Further improvements submitted: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/347.
Side results
Upon starting to unify the structure and implementing more functionality, missing JSON output support was noticed for some subcommands in libnftables. Submitted patches here as well:
- https://lore.kernel.org/netfilter-devel/20251203131736.4036382-2-georg@syscid.com/T/#u
Cluster API Provider for Harvester by rcase
Project Description
The Cluster API "infrastructure provider" for Harvester, also named CAPHV, makes it possible to use Harvester with Cluster API. This enables people and organisations to create Kubernetes clusters running on VMs created by Harvester using a declarative spec.
The project has been bootstrapped in HackWeek 23, and its code is available here.
Work done in HackWeek 2023
- Have a early working version of the provider available on Rancher Sandbox : *DONE *
- Demonstrated the created cluster can be imported using Rancher Turtles: DONE
- Stretch goal - demonstrate using the new provider with CAPRKE2: DONE and the templates are available on the repo
DONE in HackWeek 24:
- Add more Unit Tests
- Improve Status Conditions for some phases
- Add cloud provider config generation
- Testing with Harvester v1.3.2
- Template improvements
- Issues creation
DONE in 2025 (out of Hackweek)
- Support of ClusterClass
- Add to
clusterctlcommunity providers, you can add it directly withclusterctl - Testing on newer versions of Harvester v1.4.X and v1.5.X
- Support for
clusterctl generate cluster ... - Improve Status Conditions to reflect current state of Infrastructure
- Improve CI (some bugs for release creation)
Goals for HackWeek 2025
- FIRST and FOREMOST, any topic is important to you
- Add e2e testing
- Certify the provider for Rancher Turtles
- Add Machine pool labeling
- Add PCI-e passthrough capabilities.
- Other improvement suggestions are welcome!
Thanks to @isim and Dominic Giebert for their contributions!
Resources
Looking for help from anyone interested in Cluster API (CAPI) or who wants to learn more about Harvester.
This will be an infrastructure provider for Cluster API. Some background reading for the CAPI aspect:
Rewrite Distrobox in go (POC) by fabriziosestito
Description
Rewriting Distrobox in Go.
Main benefits:
- Easier to maintain and to test
- Adapter pattern for different container backends (LXC, systemd-nspawn, etc.)
Goals
- Build a minimal starting point with core commands
- Keep the CLI interface compatible: existing users shouldn't notice any difference
- Use a clean Go architecture with adapters for different container backends
- Keep dependencies minimal and binary size small
- Benchmark against the original shell script
Resources
- Upstream project: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/
- Distrobox site: https://distrobox.it/
- ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox
SUSE Health Check Tools by roseswe
SUSE HC Tools Overview
A collection of tools written in Bash or Go 1.24++ to make life easier with handling of a bunch of tar.xz balls created by supportconfig.
Background: For SUSE HC we receive a bunch of supportconfig tar balls to check them for misconfiguration, areas for improvement or future changes.
Main focus on these HC are High Availability (pacemaker), SLES itself and SAP workloads, esp. around the SUSE best practices.
Goals
- Overall improvement of the tools
- Adding new collectors
- Add support for SLES16
Resources
csv2xls* example.sh go.mod listprodids.txt sumtext* trails.go README.md csv2xls.go exceltest.go go.sum m.sh* sumtext.go vercheck.py* config.ini csvfiles/ getrpm* listprodids* rpmdate.sh* sumxls* verdriver* credtest.go example.py getrpm.go listprodids.go sccfixer.sh* sumxls.go verdriver.go
docollall.sh* extracthtml.go gethostnamectl* go.sum numastat.go cpuvul* extractcluster.go firmwarebug* gethostnamectl.go m.sh* numastattest.go cpuvul.go extracthtml* firmwarebug.go go.mod numastat* xtr_cib.sh*
$ getrpm -r pacemaker
>> Product ID: 2795 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP7 x86_64), RPM Name:
+--------------+----------------------------+--------+--------------+--------------------+
| Package Name | Version | Arch | Release | Repository |
+--------------+----------------------------+--------+--------------+--------------------+
| pacemaker | 2.1.10+20250718.fdf796ebc8 | x86_64 | 150700.3.3.1 | sle-ha/15.7/x86_64 |
| pacemaker | 2.1.9+20250410.471584e6a2 | x86_64 | 150700.1.9 | sle-ha/15.7/x86_64 |
+--------------+----------------------------+--------+--------------+--------------------+
Total packages found: 2
Rancher/k8s Trouble-Maker by tonyhansen
Project Description
When studying for my RHCSA, I found trouble-maker, which is a program that breaks a Linux OS and requires you to fix it. I want to create something similar for Rancher/k8s that can allow for troubleshooting an unknown environment.
Goals for Hackweek 25
- Update to modern Rancher and verify that existing tests still work
- Change testing logic to populate secrets instead of requiring a secondary script
- Add new tests
Goals for Hackweek 24 (Complete)
- Create a basic framework for creating Rancher/k8s cluster lab environments as needed for the Break/Fix
- Create at least 5 modules that can be applied to the cluster and require troubleshooting
Resources
- https://github.com/celidon/rancher-troublemaker
- https://github.com/rancher/terraform-provider-rancher2
- https://github.com/rancher/tf-rancher-up
- https://github.com/rancher/quickstart
The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio
Rancher is a beast of a codebase. Let's investigate if the new 2025 generation of GitHub Autonomous Coding Agents and Copilot Workspaces can actually tame it. 
The Plan
Create a sandbox GitHub Organization, clone in key Rancher repositories, and let the AI loose to see if it can handle real-world enterprise OSS maintenance - or if it just hallucinates new breeds of Kubernetes resources!
Specifically, throw "Agentic Coders" some typical tasks in a complex, long-lived open-source project, such as:
❥ The Grunt Work: generate missing GoDocs, unit tests, and refactorings. Rebase PRs.
❥ The Complex Stuff: fix actual (historical) bugs and feature requests to see if they can traverse the complexity without (too much) human hand-holding.
❥ Hunting Down Gaps: find areas lacking in docs, areas of improvement in code, dependency bumps, and so on.
If time allows, also experiment with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give agents context on our specific build pipelines and CI/CD logs.
Why?
We know AI can write "Hello World." and also moderately complex programs from a green field. But can it rebase a 3-month-old PR with conflicts in rancher/rancher? I want to find the breaking point of current AI agents to determine if and how they can help us to reduce our technical debt, work faster and better. At the same time, find out about pitfalls and shortcomings.
The CONCLUSION!!!
A
State of the Union
document was compiled to summarize lessons learned this week. For more gory details, just read on the diary below!
Cluster API Provider for Harvester by rcase
Project Description
The Cluster API "infrastructure provider" for Harvester, also named CAPHV, makes it possible to use Harvester with Cluster API. This enables people and organisations to create Kubernetes clusters running on VMs created by Harvester using a declarative spec.
The project has been bootstrapped in HackWeek 23, and its code is available here.
Work done in HackWeek 2023
- Have a early working version of the provider available on Rancher Sandbox : *DONE *
- Demonstrated the created cluster can be imported using Rancher Turtles: DONE
- Stretch goal - demonstrate using the new provider with CAPRKE2: DONE and the templates are available on the repo
DONE in HackWeek 24:
- Add more Unit Tests
- Improve Status Conditions for some phases
- Add cloud provider config generation
- Testing with Harvester v1.3.2
- Template improvements
- Issues creation
DONE in 2025 (out of Hackweek)
- Support of ClusterClass
- Add to
clusterctlcommunity providers, you can add it directly withclusterctl - Testing on newer versions of Harvester v1.4.X and v1.5.X
- Support for
clusterctl generate cluster ... - Improve Status Conditions to reflect current state of Infrastructure
- Improve CI (some bugs for release creation)
Goals for HackWeek 2025
- FIRST and FOREMOST, any topic is important to you
- Add e2e testing
- Certify the provider for Rancher Turtles
- Add Machine pool labeling
- Add PCI-e passthrough capabilities.
- Other improvement suggestions are welcome!
Thanks to @isim and Dominic Giebert for their contributions!
Resources
Looking for help from anyone interested in Cluster API (CAPI) or who wants to learn more about Harvester.
This will be an infrastructure provider for Cluster API. Some background reading for the CAPI aspect:
Rancher Cluster Lifecycle Visualizer by jferraz
Description
Rancher’s v2 provisioning system represents each downstream cluster with several Kubernetes custom resources across multiple API groups, such as clusters.provisioning.cattle.io and clusters.management.cattle.io. Understanding why a cluster is stuck in states like "Provisioning", "Updating", or "Unavailable" often requires jumping between these resources, reading conditions, and correlating them with agent connectivity and known failure modes.
This project will build a Cluster Lifecycle Visualizer: a small, read-only controller that runs in the Rancher management cluster and generates a single, human-friendly view per cluster. It will watch Rancher cluster CRDs, derive a simplified lifecycle phase, keep a history of phase transitions from installation time onward, and attach a short, actionable recommendation string that hints at what the operator should check or do next.
Goals
- Provide a compact lifecycle summary for each Rancher-managed cluster (e.g.
Provisioning,WaitingForClusterAgent,Active,Updating,Error) derived fromprovisioning.cattle.io/v1 Clusterandmanagement.cattle.io/v3 Clusterstatus and conditions. - Maintain a phase history for each cluster, allowing operators to see how its state evolved over time since the visualizer was installed.
- Attach a recommended action to the current phase using a small ruleset based on common Rancher failure modes (for example, cluster agent not connected, cluster still stabilizing after an upgrade, or generic error states), to improve the day-to-day debugging experience.
- Deliver an easy-to-install, read-only component (single YAML or small Helm chart) that Rancher users can deploy to their management cluster and inspect via
kubectl get/describe, without UI changes or direct access to downstream clusters. - Use idiomatic Go, wrangler, and Rancher APIs.
Resources
- Rancher Manager documentation on RKE2 and K3s cluster configuration and provisioning flows.
- Rancher API Go types for
provisioning.cattle.io/v1andmanagement.cattle.io/v3(from therancher/rancherrepository or published Go packages). - Existing Rancher architecture docs and internal notes about cluster provisioning, cluster agents, and node agents.
- A local Rancher management cluster (k3s or RKE2) with a few test downstream clusters to validate phase detection, history tracking, and recommendations.
A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied
Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.
Project Description
Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as:
harvester vm create my-vm --count 5
to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.
Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.
Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli
Done in previous Hackweeks
- Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
- Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE
Goal for this Hackweek
The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.
Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it
Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues
Resources
The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact).
Welcome contributions are:
- Testing it and creating issues
- Documentation
- Go code improvement
What you might learn
Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:
- GitHub Actions
- Harvester as a SUSE Product
- Go programming language
- Kubernetes API
- Kubevirt API objects (Manipulating VMs and VM Configuration in Kubernetes using Kubevirt)
