Installing Docker

Docker is an open source platform that is used for software development, making it easy to package and ship programs. Docker enables you to package your application and run it in different kinds of infrastructure such as cloud environments.

In this section, we will look at installing Docker on a local machine. Different operating systems have different steps for installing it. Refer to the Docker documentation for an in-depth installation guide relevant to your operating system, which can be found at https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/.

Note

This chapter was written on a Linux machine, so most of the command-line applications that are outlined are only available for Linux.

After taking the steps to install Docker on our development machine, the following are some of the things we do to ensure that everything is working fine.

Use the following commands to check that the Docker engine is running:

systemctl list-units --type=service --state=running...