How to Install Docker CE on Ubuntu / Debian / Fedora / Arch Linux and CentOS Linux systems ?. As of this article writing there are two main editions of Docker – Docker CE ( Community Edition) and Docker EE ( Enterprise edition). This article will be focused in the installation of Docker CE on various distributions of Linux operating system.

Docker is a container runtime engine which allows you to package an application with all of its dependencies into a standardized unit for software development.

Docker containers wrap up a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything you can install on a server. This guarantees that it will always run the same, regardless of the environment it is running in.

Here we’ll cover installation of Docker CE on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS and Arch Linux distributions.

1) Install Docker CE on Ubuntu Linux

Uninstall Old version of Docker. Old versions of docker had the name docker or docker-engine. If you have it installed, first uninstall it.

sudo apt update
sudo apt remove docker docker-engine docker.io 2>/dev/null

The Docker CE package is now called docker-ce. Update the apt package index:

sudo apt update

Install packages to allow apt to use a repository over HTTPS:

sudo apt -y install lsb-release gnupg apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

Add Docker’s official GPG key:

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

Add stable repository:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture)] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"

Install docker ce:

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

If you would like to use Docker as a non-root user, you should now consider adding your user to the “docker” group with something like:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Run the command below to see a version of docker installed.

$ docker version
Client: Docker Engine - Community
 Version:           24.0.7
 API version:       1.43
 Go version:        go1.20.10
 Git commit:        afdd53b
 Built:             Thu Oct 26 09:07:41 2023
 OS/Arch:           linux/amd64
 Context:           default

Server: Docker Engine - Community
 Engine:
  Version:          24.0.7
  API version:      1.43 (minimum version 1.12)
  Go version:       go1.20.10
  Git commit:       311b9ff
  Built:            Thu Oct 26 09:07:41 2023
  OS/Arch:          linux/amd64
  Experimental:     false
 containerd:
  Version:          1.6.24
  GitCommit:        61f9fd88f79f081d64d6fa3bb1a0dc71ec870523
 runc:
  Version:          1.1.9
  GitCommit:        v1.1.9-0-gccaecfc
 docker-init:
  Version:          0.19.0
  GitCommit:        de40ad0

To get more details about docker, run:

docker info

Check Docker Compose version using the commands:

$