Installing Docker

Docker is not absolutely required to use bistro but it brings quite some confort, since once you have it installed, you don’t need to install the programs called by your pipeline. However the installation process on your machine can be a bit challenging, and while the documentation does provide all the necessary information to have a working docker installation, it can be a bit overwhelming to newcomers. The intent of this page is to provide a short recipe of how to install docker, hoping this recipe will work in most cases. Beware though, that the instructions may not be up to date or you may have a particular system configuration requiring adjustments, so this is in no way a substitute for the instructions given in docker documentation.

Debian

The full instructions are available there. Please go check this page (and drop me an email) if the instructions below don’t work for you.

Perform the following commands as root user, or alternatively prefix all commands with sudo

$ apt update
$ apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg2 \
    software-properties-common
 $ curl -fsSL \
     https://download.docker.com/linux/$(. /etc/os-release; echo "$ID")/gpg \
     | apt-key add -
 $ add-apt-repository \
     "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/$(. /etc/os-release; echo "$ID") \
     $(lsb_release -cs) \
     stable"
 $ apt-get update
 $ apt-get install docker-ce

At this point docker should be installed, which you can check with the following command (still as root):

$ docker run hello-world

Now you need to make docker available for your normal user account. Let’s say your login is jdoe, you need to execute:

$ usermod -aG docker jdoe

and quit your (graphical session) in order for this new configuration to be taken into account. Once your back, try as a normal user:

$ docker run hello-world

If this works, you’re done!