How To Install Docker on CentOS 6

Docker is a container-based software framework for automating deployment of applications. “Containers” are encapsulated, lightweight, and portable application modules.

• As of June 2014 Docker has officially released v1.0.0.
• These instructions are intended for installing Docker.
• I’ll be working from a Liquid Web Core Managed CentOS 6.5 server, and I’ll be logged in as root.

Docker is part of Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), which is a community repository of non-standard packages for the RHEL distribution. First, we’ll install the EPEL repository:

rpm -iUvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Then, as a matter of best practice, we’ll update our packages:

yum update -y

Now let’s install Docker by installing the docker-io package:

yum -y install docker-io

Once the installation completes, we’ll need to start the Docker daemon:

service docker start

And finally, and optionally, let’s configure Docker to start when the server boots:

chkconfig docker on

Let’s begin using Docker! Download the centos Docker image:

docker pull centos

Now, to setup a basic centos container with a bash shell, we just run one command. docker run will run a command in a new container, -i attaches stdin and stdout, -t allocates a tty, and we’re using the standard fedora container.

docker run -i -t centos /bin/bash

That’s it! You’re now using a bash shell inside of a centos docker container.

To disconnect, or detach, from the shell without exiting use the escape sequence Ctrl-p + Ctrl-q.

There are many community containers already available, which can be found through a search. In the command below I am searching for the keyword centos:

docker search centos