Using the Linode Docker Machine Driver

Installing the tools and plugin

The Linode Docker Machine driver creates a Linode instance as the target environment for Docker container management.

Docker will need to be installed. Docker for Mac, Docker for Windows, Docker Toolbox, or Docker CE can be used.

If your Docker installation doesn't include the docker-machine command, you'll need to upgrade or install it from:

https://github.com/docker/machine/releases/

With docker-machine in place, install the docker-machine-driver-linode binary into your PATH from the binaries offered at:

https://github.com/linode/docker-machine-driver-linode/releases

Be sure to grab the appropriate binaries for your operating system. OSX and Linux builds are available.

Using the Linode Driver

With the binary in your path, the docker-machine command will handle Linode provisioning:

docker-machine create -d linode --help

The only arguments that are required for provisioning are the Linode APIv4 Token and a label. In practice, you will want to avoid the defaults and choose the Linode Instance type, base image, and region that best suits your needs.

Provisioning a Linode

You will need to provide a Personal Access Token for Linode APIv4 (referred to below as $LINODE_TOKEN).

$ docker-machine create -d linode --linode-token $LINODE_TOKEN  dockode
Running pre-create checks...
Creating machine...
(dockode) Creating Linode machine instance...
(dockode) Creating linode instance
(dockode) Waiting for Machine Running...
Waiting for machine to be running, this may take a few minutes...
Detecting operating system of created instance...
Waiting for SSH to be available...
Detecting the provisioner...
Provisioning with ubuntu(systemd)...
Installing Docker...
Copying certs to the local machine directory...
Copying certs to the remote machine...
Setting Docker configuration on the remote daemon...
Checking connection to Docker...
Docker is up and running!
To see how to connect your Docker Client to the Docker Engine running on this virtual machine, run: docker-machine env dockode

Interacting with the Docker Machine

The metadata being managed can be viewed with: docker-machine inspect dockode

Take a look at docker-machine -h for more examples of what can be done through this management interface.

Now that we have a Linode running Docker-CE managed by docker-machine, we can target all of our docker commands to run in that environment.

eval $(docker-machine env dockode)

The eval command ran the output of the docker-machine env command, adding the following variables to the environment:

export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY="1"
export DOCKER_HOST="tcp://123.45.67.89:2376"
export DOCKER_CERT_PATH="/Users/username/.docker/machine/machines/dockode"
export DOCKER_MACHINE_NAME="dockode"

With these variables in place, Docker will execute commands against Docker running from the Linode instance.

$ docker run -it alpine /bin/sh -c 'echo hello world'
Unable to find image 'alpine:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/alpine
6c40cc604d8e: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:b3dbf31b77fd99d9c08f780ce6f5282aba076d70a513a8be859d8d3a4d0c92b8
Status: Downloaded newer image for alpine:latest
hello world

See the official Docker Machine Getting Started guide for more information.