Install Docker on Ubuntu Server

This article will cover the step-by-step process of installing Docker on an Ubuntu Server.

Step 1. Update the apt package index.

sudo apt update

Step 2. Install packages that allow us to use the repository over HTTPS.

 sudo apt-get install \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg \
    lsb-release

Step 3. Adding the official Docker GPG keys

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

Step 4. Adding the Docker repository

echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

Step 5. Update the apt package index once more, so we have the Docker packages added to the package index.

sudo apt update

Step 6. Install Docker and its components

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose-plugin uidmap

Press Y to continue

Step 7. Start Docker.

The command below will start Docker.

sudo systemctl start docker

You can also enable Docker to run at startup. It will be useful if you are using it in production.

sudo systemctl enable docker

Now that we have Docker installed, we can run the hello-world container.

sudo docker run hello-world

If the above command runs successfully, we can proceed further and set up Docker to execute rootlessly. It means we don't need to run sudo before the docker command.

dockerd-rootless-setuptool.sh install

We can now run any docker container rootless, so to test this, let's rerun the hello-world container.

docker run hello-world

We have successfully got Docker up and running.

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