Docker: the Linux container engine

Docker is an open source project to pack, ship and run any application as a lightweight container

Docker containers are both hardware-agnostic and platform-agnostic. This means that they can run anywhere, from your laptop to the largest EC2 compute instance and everything in between - and they don't require that you use a particular language, framework or packaging system. That makes them great building blocks for deploying and scaling web apps, databases and backend services without depending on a particular stack or provider.

Docker is an open-source implementation of the deployment engine which powers dotCloud, a popular Platform-as-a-Service. It benefits directly from the experience accumulated over several years of large-scale operation and support of hundreds of thousands of applications and databases.

Better than VMs

A common method for distributing applications and sandbox their execution is to use virtual machines, or VMs. Typical VM formats are VMWare's vmdk, Oracle Virtualbox's vdi, and Amazon EC2's ami. In theory these formats should allow every developer to automatically package their application into a "machine" for easy distribution and deployment. In practice, that almost never happens, for a few reasons:

• Size: VMs are very large which makes them impractical to store and transfer.
• Performance: running VMs consumes significant CPU and memory, which makes them impractical in many scenarios, for example local development of multi-tier applications, and large-scale deployment of cpu and memory-intensive applications on large numbers of machines.
• Portability: competing VM environments don't play well with each other. Although conversion tools do exist, they are limited and add even more overhead.
• Hardware-centric: VMs were designed with machine operators in mind, not software developers. As a result, they offer very limited tooling for what developers need most: building, testing and running their software. For example, VMs offer no facilities for application versioning, monitoring, configuration, logging or service discovery.

By contrast, Docker relies on a different sandboxing method known as containerization. Unlike traditional virtualization, containerization takes place at the kernel level. Most modern operating system kernels now support the primitives necessary for containerization, including Linux with openvz, vserver and more recently lxc, Solaris with zones and FreeBSD with Jails.

Docker builds on top of these low-level primitives to offer developers a portable format and runtime environment that solves all 4 problems. Docker containers are small (and their transfer can be optimized with layers), they have basically zero memory and cpu overhead, they are completely portable and are designed from the ground up with an application-centric design.

The best part: because docker operates at the OS level, it can still be run inside a VM!

Plays well with others

Docker does not require that you buy into a particular programming language, framework, packaging system or configuration language.

Is your application a Unix process? Does it use files, tcp connections, environment variables, standard Unix streams and command-line arguments as inputs and outputs? Then docker can run it.

Can your application's build be expressed as a sequence of such commands? Then docker can build it.

Escape dependency hell

A common problem for developers is the difficulty of managing all their application's dependencies in a simple and automated way.

This is usually difficult for several reasons:

• Cross-platform dependencies. Modern applications often depend on a combination of system libraries and binaries, language-specific packages, framework-specific modules, internal components developed for another project, etc. These dependencies live in different "worlds" and require different tools - these tools typically don't work well with each other, requiring awkward custom integrations.

• Conflicting dependencies. Different applications may depend on different versions of the same dependency. Packaging tools handle these situations with various degrees of ease - but they all handle them in different and incompatible ways, which again forces the developer to do extra work.

• Custom dependencies. A developer may need to prepare a custom version of their application's dependency. Some packaging systems can handle custom versions of a dependency, others can't - and all of them handle it differently.

Docker solves dependency hell by giving the developer a simple way to express all their application's dependencies in one place, and streamline the process of assembling them. If this makes you think of XKCD 927, don't worry. Docker doesn't replace your favorite packaging systems. It simply orchestrates their use in a simple and repeatable way. How does it do that? With layers.

Docker defines a build as running a sequence of Unix commands, one after the other, in the same container. Build commands modify the contents of the container (usually by installing new files on the filesystem), the next command modifies it some more, etc. Since each build command inherits the result of the previous commands, the order in which the commands are executed expresses dependencies.

Here's a typical Docker build process:

from ubuntu:12.10
run apt-get update
run DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -q -y python
run DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -q -y python-pip
run pip install django
run DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -q -y curl
run curl -L https://github.com/shykes/helloflask/archive/master.tar.gz | tar -xzv
run cd helloflask-master && pip install -r requirements.txt

Note that Docker doesn't care how dependencies are built - as long as they can be built by running a Unix command in a container.

Getting started

Docker can be installed on your local machine as well as servers - both bare metal and virtualized. It is available as a binary on most modern Linux systems, or as a VM on Windows, Mac and other systems.

We also offer an interactive tutorial for quickly learning the basics of using Docker.

For up-to-date install instructions and online tutorials, see the Getting Started page.

Usage examples

Docker can be used to run short-lived commands, long-running daemons (app servers, databases etc.), interactive shell sessions, etc.

You can find a list of real-world examples in the documentation.

Under the hood

Under the hood, Docker is built on the following components:

• The cgroup and namespacing capabilities of the Linux kernel;
• AUFS, a powerful union filesystem with copy-on-write capabilities;
• The Go programming language;
• lxc, a set of convenience scripts to simplify the creation of Linux containers.

Contributing to Docker

Want to hack on Docker? Awesome! There are instructions to get you started here.

They are probably not perfect, please let us know if anything feels wrong or incomplete.

Legal

Transfers of Docker shall be in accordance with applicable export controls of any country and all other applicable legal requirements. Docker shall not be distributed or downloaded to or in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria and shall not be distributed or downloaded to any person on the Denied Persons List administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce.