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Introduction to the Docker Machine

intermediate/docker-machine/README.md

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Introduction to the Docker Machine

Docke-machine

Docker machine is a tool which lets you to install docker engine in remote hosts. It can be used to provision docker in different operating system or even in the different cloud providers like aws, azure, digitaloceans, etc. docker-machine command handles all the activities of remote hosts. Visit docker-machine for the official documentation.

Installation

You can install docker-machine in various flavours of linux operating system and since I am using fedora so this file contain installation steps required to install in it.

  1. Install Docker

  2. Execute the following command which download the docker-machine binary and put it into your $PATH.

base=https://github.com/docker/machine/releases/download/v0.16.0 &&
curl -L $base/docker-machine-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) >/tmp/docker-machine &&
sudo mv /tmp/docker-machine /usr/local/bin/docker-machine &&
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-machine
  1. Verify the installation
docker-machine version

For installation of docker-machine in other operating systems, kindly follow the Official Documentation.

Driver dependency

For using docker-machine to create, use and manage the docker host locally, you should have virtualization driver installed in your system. There are different drivers availabe which supports docker-machine depending upon the type of virtualizaiton technology you use. For KVM, docker-machine use docker-machine-driver-kvm where as for Virtualbox it uses virtualbox driver.

  1. KVM driver
  • Configuring in RHEL/CentOS based system.
curl -L https://github.com/dhiltgen/docker-machine-kvm/releases/download/v0.10.0/docker-machine-driver-kvm-centos7 \
> /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-driver-kvm \ 
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-driver-kvm
  • Configuring in Debian based system.
curl -L https://github.com/dhiltgen/docker-machine-kvm/releases/download/v0.10.0/docker-machine-driver-kvm-ubuntu14.04 \
> /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-driver-kvm \ 
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-driver-kvm
  1. VritualBox

Virtualbox uses vboxdrv driver and installation is quite simple than that of KVM. Install virtualbox and you are all set to use docker-machine.

Provision of docker host locally

To create docker host locally you can simply execute docker-machine create docker-vm-name. This command goes forward to create docker virtual machine locally on top of your hypervisor. In palce of docker-vm-name I've used vm1 for simplicity. You can also specify the particular driver for instantiating vm depending upon your requirements, for e.g. to use virtualbox driver you can simply append virtualbox with -d as a driver option i.e.

docker-machine create -d virtualbox vm1

You can create as many docker vm as per your requirements. You can use docker-machine ls command to list all the docker machines installed locally. This command also provides information of vm like name, status, driver, state, ip, etc.

To start the stoped docker_machine, execute:

docker-machine start vm1

Running containers on docker machine

After creating docker machine you can execute command from the host system to the vm1. For this you need to connect your shell to the docker machine.i.e.

eval $(docker-machine env vm1)

Now you can simply execute the commands in newly created docker_machine_vm from your local system. i.e.

docker run -it --security-opt seccomp:unconfined ubuntu /bin/bash

This command pull the ubuntu image in vm1 from the docker reigistry and invoke bash terminal from it.

You can switch between different docker virtual machines with the help of eval command.

Contributor - Yadav Lamichhane