Installing 1.12 version on Amazon Linux AMI

Question

This page works as expected if I choose Ubuntu 14.04 image.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/cloud/cloud-ex-aws/

But If I choose Amazon Linux AMI, (the first one in the list shown in the image) then I am not able to install 1.12 version of docker.

I can however install older version using ...

yum install docker 

But I am trying to install the latest 1.12 version on Amazon Linux AMI. Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Answer 1

I managed to get Docker 1.12.2 running on Amazon Linux. Here are the steps I took:

Download the version of Docker you want to your Amazon Linux instance (as a gzipped tar), and extract it. This creates a directory called docker/ containing Docker binaries.

wget https://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-1.12.2.tgz
tar -xvzf docker-1.12.2.tgz

Move all the Docker binaries into /usr/local/bin.

sudo mv docker/* /usr/local/bin/

You need to run a script called cgroupfs-mount (as superuser) before starting up the Docker daemon. The easiest way to get this script is by cloning the git repo containing it.

git clone https://github.com/tianon/cgroupfs-mount
sudo mv cgroupfs-mount/cgroupfs-mount /usr/local/bin/

Change to the superuser and make sure that /usr/local/bin/ is in your path (on Amazon Linux at least this is not the case by default).

sudo su
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Now you can run the cgroupfs-mount script and start the Docker daemon (as a background process).

cgroupfs-mount
dockerd &

You can call regular Docker commands (e.g. docker pull) as any user who belongs to the docker group, while dockerd is running. Missing from these installation steps is having cgroupfs-mount and dockerd be automatically run at start up time.

As an aside, I would recommend avoiding Amazon Linux if at all possible and using a mainstream distro like Ubuntu or CentOS instead, which seem to have much better support for Docker.