page_title: Installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
page_description: Installation instructions for Docker on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
page_keywords: Docker, Docker documentation, requirements, linux, rhel, centos

# Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Docker is available for **RHEL** on EPEL. These instructions should work
for both RHEL and CentOS. They will likely work for other binary
compatible EL6 distributions as well, but they haven't been tested.

Please note that this package is part of [Extra Packages for Enterprise
Linux (EPEL)](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL), a community effort
to create and maintain additional packages for the RHEL distribution.

Also note that due to the current Docker limitations, Docker is able to
run only on the **64 bit** architecture.

You will need [RHEL
6.5](https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/3078#RHEL6) or higher, with
a RHEL 6 kernel version 2.6.32-431 or higher as this has specific kernel
fixes to allow Docker to work.

## Installation

Firstly, you need to install the EPEL repository. Please follow the
[EPEL installation
instructions](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL#How_can_I_use_these_extra_packages.3F).

The `docker-io` package provides Docker on EPEL.

If you already have the (unrelated) `docker` package
installed, it will conflict with `docker-io`.
There's a [bug report](
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1043676) filed for it.
To proceed with `docker-io` installation, please remove `docker` first.

Next, let's install the `docker-io` package which
will install Docker on our host.

    $ sudo yum -y install docker-io

To update the `docker-io` package

    $ sudo yum -y update docker-io

Now that it's installed, let's start the Docker daemon.

    $ sudo service docker start

If we want Docker to start at boot, we should also:

    $ sudo chkconfig docker on

Now let's verify that Docker is working.

    $ sudo docker run -i -t fedora /bin/bash

**Done!**

Continue with the [User Guide](/userguide/).

## Issues?

If you have any issues - please report them directly in the
[Red Hat Bugzilla for docker-io component](
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora%20EPEL&component=docker-io).