Quality of life

Tunning a Docker server? You’ll want to be as hands-off as possible.

That means giving Docker slightly more access, but on the flip side, it means a slight reduction in security, so it’s up to you if you wish to follow these steps. First, create a new group just for Docker by using sudo groupadd docker , then add your current user to the docker group with sudo usermod -aG docker $ USER . Log out, then log back in, and you should now be able to run Docker commands (try docker run helloworld ) without prepending them with “sudo”. If you see an error, it’s probably a permissions issue with your ~/.docker/ folder, caused by using “sudo” previously; you can either kill your existing folder with rm -f ~/.docker/ and start again, or give the folder the appropriate permissions, first with sudo chown “$ USER”:”$ USER” / home/”$ USER”/.docker -R , then with sudo chmod g+rwx “/home/ $ USER/.docker” -R . Make sure you offer similar permissions to other folders you create, for storing data or media in your containers.

It’s handy to have Docker run automatically upon boot, so you don’t need to grab your peripherals (or log in via SSH) to get your server back up and running if you power cycle. Just add Docker to Systemd, the Linux component that (in most modern distributions) deals with managing the processes that run at boot time, by running sudo systemctl enable docker within your command line. Type systemctl to check it’s worked — dig through the list until you see “docker.service” listed. If you ever change your mind, you can reverse the action with (you guessed it) sudo systemctl disable docker .