Install Docker Engine

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Supported platforms

Docker Engine is available on a variety of Linux platforms, macOS and Windows 10 through Docker Desktop, and as a static binary installation. Find your preferred operating system below.

Desktop

Platform	x86_64 / amd64
Docker Desktop for Mac (macOS)
Docker Desktop for Windows

Server

Docker provides .deb and .rpm packages from the following Linux distributions and architectures:

Platform	x86_64 / amd64	ARM	ARM64 / AARCH64
CentOS
Debian
Fedora
Raspbian
Ubuntu

Other Linux distributions

Note

While the instructions below may work, Docker does not test or verify installation on derivatives.

• Users of Debian derivatives such as “BunsenLabs Linux”, “Kali Linux” or “LMDE” (Debian-based Mint) should follow the installation instructions for Debian, substituting the version of their distro for the corresponding Debian release. Refer to the documentation of your distro to find which Debian release corresponds with your derivative version.
• Likewise, users of Ubuntu derivatives such as “Kubuntu”, “Lubuntu” or “Xubuntu” should follow the installation instructions for Ubuntu, substituting the version of their distro for the corresponding Ubuntu release. Refer to the documentation of your distro to find which Ubuntu release corresponds with your derivative version.
• Some Linux distributions are providing a package of Docker Engine through their package repositories. These packages are built and maintained by the Linux distribution’s package maintainers and may have differences in configuration or built from modified source code. Docker is not involved in releasing these packages and bugs or issues involving these packages should be reported in your Linux distribution’s issue tracker.

Docker provides binaries for manual installation of Docker Engine. These binaries are statically linked and can be used on any Linux distribution.

Release channels

Docker Engine has three types of update channels, stable, test, and nightly:

• The Stable channel gives you latest releases for general availability.
• The Test channel gives pre-releases that are ready for testing before general availability (GA).
• The Nightly channel gives you latest builds of work in progress for the next major release.

Stable

Year-month releases are made from a release branch diverged from the master branch. The branch is created with format <year>.<month>, for example 19.03. The year-month name indicates the earliest possible calendar month to expect the release to be generally available. All further patch releases are performed from that branch. For example, once v19.03.0 is released, all subsequent patch releases are built from the 19.03 branch.

Test

In preparation for a new year-month release, a branch is created from the master branch with format YY.mm when the milestones desired by Docker for the release have achieved feature-complete. Pre-releases such as betas and release candidates are conducted from their respective release branches. Patch releases and the corresponding pre-releases are performed from within the corresponding release branch.

Nightly

Nightly builds give you the latest builds of work in progress for the next major release. They are created once per day from the master branch with the version format:

0.0.0-YYYYmmddHHMMSS-abcdefabcdef

where the time is the commit time in UTC and the final suffix is the prefix of the commit hash, for example 0.0.0-20180720214833-f61e0f7.

These builds allow for testing from the latest code on the master branch. No qualifications or guarantees are made for the nightly builds.

Support

Docker Engine releases of a year-month branch are supported with patches as needed for one month after the next year-month general availability release.

This means bug reports and backports to release branches are assessed until the end-of-life date.

After the year-month branch has reached end-of-life, the branch may be deleted from the repository.

Backporting

Backports to the Docker products are prioritized by the Docker company. A Docker employee or repository maintainer will endeavour to ensure sensible bugfixes make it into active releases.

If there are important fixes that ought to be considered for backport to active release branches, be sure to highlight this in the PR description or by adding a comment to the PR.

Upgrade path

Patch releases are always backward compatible with its year-month version.

Licensing

Docker is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.

Reporting security issues

The Docker maintainers take security seriously. If you discover a security issue, please bring it to their attention right away!

Please DO NOT file a public issue; instead send your report privately to security@docker.com.

Security reports are greatly appreciated, and Docker will publicly thank you for it.

Get started

After setting up Docker, you can learn the basics with Getting started with Docker.