Cannot install Docker on Debian Jessie

Question

Despite trying both the official installation mechanism using the new apt repo described here, as well as the curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh route, I still get E: Unable to locate package docker-engine from APT when I try to apt-get install docker-engine.

My versions are:

$ uname -a
Linux blah 4.5.5-x86_64-linode69 #3 SMP Fri May 20 15:25:13 EDT 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux


$ lsb_release -c
Codename:       jessie

$ cat /etc/debian_version
8.5

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stable main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main
deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main

The only file in my /etc/apt/sources.list.d is docker.list which contains:

deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo debian-jessie main

apt-cache policy docker-engine doesn't find it either:

apt-cache policy docker-engine
N: Unable to locate package docker-engine

How might I resolve this?

Answer 1

Edit your sources.list and change the following line from:

deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main

to

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main

Update and install docker:

apt-get update
apt-get install docker.io

Edit

To install a specific version of docker-engine download the .deb package from here, e,g the latest one is docker-engine_1.9.1-0~jessie_amd64.deb:

wget https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo/pool/main/d/docker-engine/docker-engine_1.9.1-0~jessie_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get update
dpkg -i docker-engine_1.9.1-0~jessie_amd64.deb

Maybe you will get an error , to fix it run:

apt-get -f install
dpkg -i docker-engine_1.9.1-0~jessie_amd64.deb

Answer 2

Your dpkg architecture is probably using 32bit. You can check this using:

dpkg --print-architecture

Fix it by adding amd64 as a foreign architecture:

dpkg --add-architecture amd64
dpkg --print-foreign-architectures

Update your package lists and check for docker-engine:

apt-get update
apt-cache policy docker-engine

Source: https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTO