Installing Docker on Arch Linux

Mon 7th March 2022 By David T. Sadler.

Installing Docker

Docker is installed via pacman.

$ sudo pacman -S docker

Starting Docker Engine

Start the Docker daemon which provides the Docker Engine. This process serves the Docker API and manages Docker containers.

$ sudo systemctl start docker.service

If you want Docker Engine to automatically start when you system boots issue the below command.

$ sudo systemctl enable docker.service

Verify that Docker Engine is running.

$ docker info

Verify that you can run containers. The below will download the latest Arch Linux image and use it to run a "Hello World" bash script in the container.

$ docker run -it --rm archlinux bash -c "echo Hello World"

Problems

You may get an error when running docker info.

$ docker info

Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: Get http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.39/containers/json: dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied

The issue is that the user you're running the docker command as is not a member of the docker group. Therefore you can either run the command via sudo or add your user to the docker user group, re-login, and restart docker.service.

Links

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License

Copyright © 2021 David T. Sadler.