Getting started with Docker

Installation

RPM packages to install Docker are available directly from Fedora repositories or from Docker and the Docker community. Fedora rpms have a slightly different naming convention.

Fedora rpms and installation guidelines

The Installing Docker and Docker-Compose Quick Doc has information on the Docker rpms available directly from Fedora as well as installation guidelines.

Docker Community rpms and installation guidelines

Install the docker-ce package using the Docker repository:

To install the dnf-plugins-core package (which provides the commands to manage your DNF repositories) and set up the stable repository.

$ sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core

To add the docker-ce repository

• on Fedora 40:

$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/fedora/docker-ce.repo

• on Fedora 41 and newer:

$ sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile="https://download.docker.com/linux/fedora/docker-ce.repo"

To install the docker engine. The Docker daemon relies on a OCI compliant runtime (invoked via the containerd daemon) as its interface to the Linux kernel namespaces, cgroups, and SELinux.

$ sudo dnf install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Starting the Docker service

To start the Docker service use:

$ sudo systemctl start docker

Now you can verify that Docker was correctly installed and is running by running the Docker hello-world image.

$ sudo docker run hello-world

Start the Docker daemon at boot

To make Docker start when you boot your system, use the command:

$ sudo systemctl enable docker

For additional systemd configuration options for Docker, like adding an HTTP Proxy, refer to the Docker documentation Systemd article.

Why can’t I use docker command as a non root user, by default?

The Docker daemon binds to a Unix socket instead of a TCP port. By default that Unix socket is owned by the user root and other users can access it with sudo. For this reason, Docker daemon always runs as the root user.

You can either set up sudo to give docker access to non-root users.

Or you can create a Unix group called docker and add users to it. When the Docker daemon starts, it makes the ownership of the Unix socket read/writable by the docker group.

Warning: The docker group is equivalent to the root user; For details on how this impacts security in your system, see Docker Daemon Attack Surface for details.

To create the docker group and add your user:

$ sudo groupadd docker && sudo gpasswd -a ${USER} docker && sudo systemctl restart docker
$ newgrp docker

You have to log out and log back in (or restart Docker daemon and use newgrp command as mentioned here) for these changes to take effect. Then you can verify if your changes were successful by running Docker without sudo.

Authors: Abe Hanoka, Brad Smith, HatMann, Jarek Prokop, Nick Dirschel