Installation

Docker can now be installed on Amazon EC2 with a single vagrant command. Vagrant 1.1 or higher is required.

1. Install vagrant from http://www.vagrantup.com/ (or use your package manager)

2. Install the vagrant aws plugin

   vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws
   

3. Get the docker sources, this will give you the latest Vagrantfile.

   git clone https://github.com/dotcloud/docker.git
   

4. Check your AWS environment.

   Create a keypair specifically for EC2, give it a name and save it to your disk. I usually store these in my ~/.ssh/ folder.

   Check that your default security group has an inbound rule to accept SSH (port 22) connections.

5. Inform Vagrant of your settings

   Vagrant will read your access credentials from your environment, so we need to set them there first. Make sure you have everything on amazon aws setup so you can (manually) deploy a new image to EC2.

   export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxx
   export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxx
   export AWS_KEYPAIR_NAME=xxx
   export AWS_SSH_PRIVKEY=xxx
   

   The environment variables are:

   • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - The API key used to make requests to AWS
   • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - The secret key to make AWS API requests
   • AWS_KEYPAIR_NAME - The name of the keypair used for this EC2 instance
   • AWS_SSH_PRIVKEY - The path to the private key for the named keypair, for example ~/.ssh/docker.pem

   You can check if they are set correctly by doing something like

   echo $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
   

6. Do the magic!

   vagrant up --provider=aws
   

   If it stalls indefinitely on [default] Waiting for SSH to become available..., Double check your default security zone on AWS includes rights to SSH (port 22) to your container.

   If you have an advanced AWS setup, you might want to have a look at the https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws

7. Connect to your machine

   vagrant ssh
   

8. Your first command

   Now you are in the VM, run docker

   docker
   

Continue with the Hello World example.