What are the two project layouts offered by Rancher on installation?

Question

During login after initial setup, Rancher CLI asks the following:

Do you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
NUMBER    CLUSTER NAME                          PROJECT ID        PROJECT NAME   PROJECT DESCRIPTION
1         xxx                                   c-5tcls:p-b4r55   System         System project created for the cluster
2         xxx                                   c-5tcls:p-tmx85   Default        Default project created for the cluster

What is the difference and is there a way to make this choice non-interactively in a headless environment?

Note. For some reason, 1 and 2 get randomly swapped from time to time we run this.

Answer 1

Project is a Rancher specific concept. A Project can have multiple Kubernetes namespaces.

The System Project has all the Kubernetes system components like kube-dns, ingress etc. Think of it like System Services running on a machine/laptop.

Default project is where you can launch your workloads to start with. Similar to a scratchpad.

You can create new projects too. For example, Web App, Database, etc. Or it could be based on different users using the cluster. Project-For-Bob, Project-For-John.