Installing Docker and Docker Compose on Vagrant (Ubuntu)

Overview

This is a summary of the steps I used to install Docker and Docker Compose on Vagrant (Ubuntu), which I set up for building a development environment.

Creating the Vagrantfile

I’ve kept it pretty simple.

• Vagrantfile

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.35.101"
end

You can also install Docker Compose with vagrant provision, but since provisioning that relies on Vagrant can’t be reused in other environments, I’ll take the approach of installing it on the OS itself.

Starting the VM

MacOS%$ vagrant up
...
wait a while
...

MacOS%$ vagrant ssh

// SSH login successful
vagrant%$

Checking the Vagrant Ubuntu Environment Info

vagrant%$ lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
Release:        14.04
Codename:       trusty

Checking the Kernel Version

vagrant%$ uname -r
3.13.0-116-generic

A kernel version lower than 3.10 risks causing bugs, so that’s a no-go. Use a box with a higher kernel version instead.

Uninstalling Old Versions

vagrant%$ sudo apt-get remove docker docker-engine

Installing the extra Packages

This is to allow Docker to use the aufs storage driver.

vagrant%$ sudo apt-get update
vagrant%$ sudo apt-get -y install \
    wget \
    linux-image-extra-$(uname -r) \
    linux-image-extra-virtual

Installing Docker

// Install Docker
vagrant%$ wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh

// Check the Docker version
vagrant%$ docker --version
Docker version 17.04.0-ce, build 4845c56

// Add the vagrant user to the docker group (you can confirm it takes effect once you log out and log back in)
vagrant%$ sudo usermod -aG docker vagrant

Installing Docker Compose

vagrant%$ curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.12.0/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" >  ~/docker-compose

// Grant execute permission
vagrant%$ chmod +x ~/docker-compose

// Move it into the execution path
vagrant%$ sudo mv docker-compose /usr/bin/

// Check the Docker Compose version
vagrant%$ docker-compose --version
docker-compose version 1.12.0, build b31ff33

Log Out Once and Log Back In

vagrant%$ exit
MacOS%$ vagrant ssh
vagrant%$

Adjusting Memory and Swap Usage

To reduce memory overhead and performance degradation when Docker is not in use, you need to configure GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader).

• grub configuration

vagrant%$ sudo vi /etc/default/grub

# GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="cgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1"

• Update GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader)

vagrant%$ sudo update-grub

// Reboot just to be safe
vagrant%$ sudo reboot

That completes the setup ♪

Let’s Try It Out Right Away

As a quick tutorial, let’s spin up an nginx container.

vagrant%$ docker run --rm -p 80:80 nginx:mainline-alpine

Unable to find image 'nginx:mainline-alpine' locally
mainline-alpine: Pulling from library/nginx
709515475419: Already exists
4b21d71b440a: Pull complete
c92260fe6357: Pull complete
ed383a1b82df: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:5aadb68304a38a8e2719605e4e180413f390cd6647602bee9bdedd59753c3590
Status: Downloaded newer image for nginx:mainline-alpine

Accessing from a Browser

Access it from a browser on your local Mac.

http://192.168.35.101

• 192.168.35.101 … the private IP specified in Vagrant

The Welcome page was displayed without any problems.

You can see that an access log like the following is output to the earlier log.

192.168.35.1 - - [13/Apr/2017:10:45:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36" "-"

We can now access it through MacOS → Vagrant → Docker ♪

Addendum

I’ve placed the Box I created this time on Vagrant Cloud.

https://atlas.hashicorp.com/kenzo0107/boxes/ubuntu14.04.5LTS-docker-dockercompose/

Based on this setup, I’d like to write about building various environments going forward ♪

References

• Using the AUFS storage driver
• Docker run reference