Resources API (Experimental)

Note: This API is experimental and may change in future releases. Available from Rancher 2.15 and onwards

What is the Resources API?

The Resources API helps extension developers interact with Kubernetes and Rancher resources programmatically. This API provides a type-safe interface for common resource operations such as listing, retrieving, and filtering resources with full TypeScript support and autocomplete.

The API is organized into two contexts:

• Cluster Context (cluster) - For cluster-scoped Kubernetes resources (Pods, Deployments, Services, etc.)
• Management Context (mgmt) - For global Rancher resources (Users, Clusters, Settings, etc.)

Both contexts implement the same base ResourcesApi interface, so they share the same methods (find, findFiltered, findAll).

How to use the Resources API

Using Options API in Vue

To use the Resources API in the context of the Options API of a Vue component, we globally expose the $resources property, which is available under the this object:

import { K8S } from '@shell/apis';

export default {
  async mounted() {
    // Cluster context
    const pods = await this.$resources.cluster.findFiltered(K8S.POD);
    
    // Management context
    const users = await this.$resources.mgmt.findFiltered(K8S.USER);
  }
}

Using Composition API in Vue

To use the Resources API in the context of the Composition API of a Vue component, we'll need to import the correct method to make the API available in the component:

import { useResources } from '@shell/apis';

then just assign to a constant in the context for your component and use it:

import { useResources, K8S } from '@shell/apis';

const resources = useResources();

// Cluster context - for cluster-scoped resources
const pods = await resources.cluster.findFiltered(K8S.POD);
const deployment = await resources.cluster.find(K8S.DEPLOYMENT, 'default/my-app');

// Management context - for global resources
const users = await resources.mgmt.findFiltered(K8S.USER);
const user = await resources.mgmt.find(K8S.USER, 'u-xyz789');

Resource Constants

The K8S object contains constants for common Kubernetes and Rancher resources:

import { K8S } from '@shell/apis';

// Core Kubernetes resources
K8S.POD
K8S.SERVICE
K8S.CONFIG_MAP
K8S.SECRET
K8S.NAMESPACE
K8S.NODE

// Workload resources
K8S.DEPLOYMENT
K8S.STATEFUL_SET
K8S.DAEMON_SET

// Rancher Management
K8S.USER
K8S.PROJECT
K8S.GLOBAL_ROLE

// And many more...

For custom resources or CRDs, you can use strings directly:

const customResources = await resources.cluster.findFiltered('mycompany.io.customresource');

Available API's

API	Description
Cluster API	Interact with cluster-scoped Kubernetes resources (Pods, Deployments, Services, etc.)
Management API	Interact with global Rancher resources (Users, Clusters, Settings, etc.)