Update & Upgrade Docker distribution on Windows

Question

At the moment I've got Docker v.1.7 and I'd want to upgrade it to latest (1.8 at the moment).

Important part: I want to do this without installing Docker and boot2docker again. I wasn't able to find any info about it.

Is it possible? And how can I do this?

Answer 1

This is an old thread, but I just had the same issue on Windows and the accepted answer didn't work for me, so I'm posting this for others who come along.

You can check your version by opening your Docker Quick Start terminal and running:

$ docker --version Docker version 17.10.0-ce, build f4ffd25

To update all you had to do is run $ docker-machine upgrade

User1234@HP-1234 MINGW64 ~
$ docker-machine upgrade
Waiting for SSH to be available...
Detecting the provisioner...
Upgrading docker...
Stopping machine to do the upgrade...
Upgrading machine "default"...
Default Boot2Docker ISO is out-of-date, downloading the latest release...
Latest release for github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker is v18.01.0-ce
Downloading C:\Users\User1234\.docker\machine\cache\boot2docker.iso from https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/releases/download/v18.01.0-ce/boot2docker.iso...
0%....10%....20%....30%....40%....50%....60%....70%....80%....90%....100%
Copying C:\Users\User1234\.docker\machine\cache\boot2docker.iso to C:\Users\User1234\.docker\machine\machines\default\boot2docker.iso...
Starting machine back up...
(default) Check network to re-create if needed...
(default) Windows might ask for the permission to configure a dhcp server. Sometimes, such confirmation window is minimized in the taskbar.
(default) Waiting for an IP...
Restarting docker...

Answer 2

If you already have boot2docker, the upgrade is the usual:

boot2docker stop
boot2docker download
boot2docker start

docker@boot2docker:~$ docker version
Client:
 Version:      1.8.1
 API version:  1.20
 Go version:   go1.4.2
 Git commit:   d12ea79
 Built:        Thu Aug 13 02:49:29 UTC 2015
 OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

That being said, going forward, docker machine is the recommended project to use.
See "Get started with Docker Machine and a local VM".