Install Docker Engine on RHEL (2024)

Table of contents

Experimental
Support for Docker Engine on RHEL x86_64 and aarch64 is experimental.

Docker Desktop for Linux is also available for RHEL.
To get access, join theEarly Access Program.

To get started with Docker Engine on RHEL, make sure youmeet the prerequisites, and then follow theinstallation steps.

OS requirements

To install Docker Engine, you need a maintained version of one of the followingRHEL versions:

RHEL 8
RHEL 9

Uninstall old versions

Older versions of Docker went by docker or docker-engine.Uninstall any such older versions before attempting to install a new version,along with associated dependencies. Also uninstall Podman and the associateddependencies if installed already:

$ sudo yum remove docker \ docker-client \ docker-client-latest \ docker-common \ docker-latest \ docker-latest-logrotate \ docker-logrotate \ docker-engine \ podman \ runc

yum might report that you have none of these packages installed.

Images, containers, volumes, and networks stored in /var/lib/docker/ aren'tautomatically removed when you uninstall Docker.

Installation methods

You can install Docker Engine in different ways, depending on your needs:

You canset up Docker's repositories and installfrom them, for ease of installation and upgrade tasks. This is therecommended approach.
You can download the RPM package,install it manually, and manageupgrades completely manually. This is useful in situations such as installingDocker on air-gapped systems with no access to the internet.
In testing and development environments, you can use automatedconvenience scripts to install Docker.

Install using the rpm repository

Before you install Docker Engine for the first time on a new host machine, youneed to set up the Docker repository. Afterward, you can install and updateDocker from the repository.

Set up the repository

Install the yum-utils package (which provides the yum-config-managerutility) and set up the repository.

$ sudo yum install -y yum-utils$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/rhel/docker-ce.repo

Install Docker Engine

Install Docker Engine, containerd, and Docker Compose:
To install the latest version, run:
$ sudo yum install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
If prompted to accept the GPG key, verify that the fingerprint matches060A 61C5 1B55 8A7F 742B 77AA C52F EB6B 621E 9F35, and if so, accept it.
This command installs Docker, but it doesn't start Docker. It also creates adocker group, however, it doesn't add any users to the group by default.
To install a specific version, start by listing the available versions inthe repository:
$ yum list docker-ce --showduplicates | sort -rdocker-ce.x86_64 3:27.1.1-1.el9 docker-ce-stabledocker-ce.x86_64 3:27.1.0-1.el9 docker-ce-stable<...>
The list returned depends on which repositories are enabled, and is specificto your version of RHEL (indicated by the .el9 suffix in this example).
Install a specific version by its fully qualified package name, which isthe package name (docker-ce) plus the version string (2nd column),separated by a hyphen (-). For example, docker-ce-3:27.1.1-1.el9.
Replace <VERSION_STRING> with the desired version and then run the followingcommand to install:
$ sudo yum install docker-ce-<VERSION_STRING> docker-ce-cli-<VERSION_STRING> containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
This command installs Docker, but it doesn't start Docker. It also creates adocker group, however, it doesn't add any users to the group by default.
Start Docker.
$ sudo systemctl start docker
Verify that the Docker Engine installation is successful by running thehello-world image.
$ sudo docker run hello-world
This command downloads a test image and runs it in a container. When thecontainer runs, it prints a confirmation message and exits.

You have now successfully installed and started Docker Engine.

Tip
Receiving errors when trying to run without root?
The docker user group exists but contains no users, which is why you’re requiredto use sudo to run Docker commands. Continue toLinux postinstallto allow non-privileged users to run Docker commands and for other optional configuration steps.

Upgrade Docker Engine

To upgrade Docker Engine, follow theinstallation instructions,choosing the new version you want to install.

Install from a package

If you can't use Docker's rpm repository to install Docker Engine, you candownload the .rpm file for your release and install it manually. You need todownload a new file each time you want to upgrade Docker Engine.

Go tohttps://download.docker.com/linux/rhel/.
Select your RHEL version in the list.
Select the applicable architecture (x86_64, aarch64, or s390x), andthen go to stable/Packages/.
Download the following rpm files for the Docker Engine, CLI, containerd,and Docker Compose packages:
- containerd.io-<version>.<arch>.rpm
- docker-ce-<version>.<arch>.rpm
- docker-ce-cli-<version>.<arch>.rpm
- docker-buildx-plugin-<version>.<arch>.rpm
- docker-compose-plugin-<version>.<arch>.rpm

Install Docker Engine, changing the following path to the path where you downloadedthe packages.

$ sudo yum install ./containerd.io-<version>.<arch>.rpm \ ./docker-ce-<version>.<arch>.rpm \ ./docker-ce-cli-<version>.<arch>.rpm \ ./docker-buildx-plugin-<version>.<arch>.rpm \ ./docker-compose-plugin-<version>.<arch>.rpm

Docker is installed but not started. The docker group is created, but nousers are added to the group.

Start Docker.
$ sudo systemctl start docker
Verify that the Docker Engine installation is successful by running thehello-world image.
$ sudo docker run hello-world
This command downloads a test image and runs it in a container. When thecontainer runs, it prints a confirmation message and exits.

You have now successfully installed and started Docker Engine.

Tip
Receiving errors when trying to run without root?
The docker user group exists but contains no users, which is why you’re requiredto use sudo to run Docker commands. Continue toLinux postinstallto allow non-privileged users to run Docker commands and for other optional configuration steps.

Upgrade Docker Engine

To upgrade Docker Engine, download the newer package files and repeat theinstallation procedure, using yum -y upgradeinstead of yum -y install, and point to the new files.

Install using the convenience script

Docker provides a convenience script athttps://get.docker.com/ to install Docker intodevelopment environments non-interactively. The convenience script isn'trecommended for production environments, but it's useful for creating aprovisioning script tailored to your needs. Also refer to theinstall using the repository steps to learnabout installation steps to install using the package repository. The source codefor the script is open source, and you can find it in thedocker-install repository on GitHub.

Always examine scripts downloaded from the internet before running them locally.Before installing, make yourself familiar with potential risks and limitationsof the convenience script:

The script requires root or sudo privileges to run.
The script attempts to detect your Linux distribution and version andconfigure your package management system for you.
The script doesn't allow you to customize most installation parameters.
The script installs dependencies and recommendations without asking forconfirmation. This may install a large number of packages, depending on thecurrent configuration of your host machine.
By default, the script installs the latest stable release of Docker,containerd, and runc. When using this script to provision a machine, this mayresult in unexpected major version upgrades of Docker. Always test upgrades ina test environment before deploying to your production systems.
The script isn't designed to upgrade an existing Docker installation. Whenusing the script to update an existing installation, dependencies may not beupdated to the expected version, resulting in outdated versions.

Tip: preview script steps before running
You can run the script with the --dry-run option to learn what steps thescript will run when invoked:
$ curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh$ sudo sh ./get-docker.sh --dry-run

This example downloads the script fromhttps://get.docker.com/ and runs it to install thelatest stable release of Docker on Linux:

$ curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh$ sudo sh get-docker.shExecuting docker install script, commit: 7cae5f8b0decc17d6571f9f52eb840fbc13b2737<...>

You have now successfully installed and started Docker Engine. The dockerservice starts automatically on Debian based distributions. On RPM baseddistributions, such as CentOS, Fedora, RHEL or SLES, you need to start itmanually using the appropriate systemctl or service command. As the messageindicates, non-root users can't run Docker commands by default.

Use Docker as a non-privileged user, or install in rootless mode?
The installation script requires root or sudo privileges to install anduse Docker. If you want to grant non-root users access to Docker, refer to thepost-installation steps for Linux.You can also install Docker without root privileges, or configured to run inrootless mode. For instructions on running Docker in rootless mode, refer torun the Docker daemon as a non-root user (rootless mode).

Install pre-releases

Docker also provides a convenience script athttps://test.docker.com/ to install pre-releases ofDocker on Linux. This script is equal to the script at get.docker.com, butconfigures your package manager to use the test channel of the Docker packagerepository. The test channel includes both stable and pre-releases (betaversions, release-candidates) of Docker. Use this script to get early access tonew releases, and to evaluate them in a testing environment before they'rereleased as stable.

To install the latest version of Docker on Linux from the test channel, run:

$ curl -fsSL https://test.docker.com -o test-docker.sh$ sudo sh test-docker.sh

Upgrade Docker after using the convenience script

If you installed Docker using the convenience script, you should upgrade Dockerusing your package manager directly. There's no advantage to re-running theconvenience script. Re-running it can cause issues if it attempts to re-installrepositories which already exist on the host machine.

Uninstall the Docker Engine, CLI, containerd, and Docker Compose packages:

$ sudo yum remove docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin docker-ce-rootless-extras

Images, containers, volumes, or custom configuration files on your hostaren't automatically removed. To delete all images, containers, and volumes:
$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/containerd

You have to delete any edited configuration files manually.

Next steps

Continue toPost-installation steps for Linux.