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Rohan Sawant
Rohan Sawant

Posted on • Edited on

Install Docker on Raspberry Pi

Installing Docker and Docker Compose on the Raspberry Pi in 5 Simple Steps

You know what Docker is. You know what a Raspberry Pi is. Let me make sure they hit it off together. 😎🤝🏽

This is probably one of the quickest and easiest ways to get Docker and Docker Compose running on the Raspberry Pi.
(Tested with Raspberry Pi B+ Rev 1.2 and Raspberry Pi 4)

After searching the Inter-Webs for hours and having several things not work for me, I decided something needed to be done about it.

Steps

1. Install Docker

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh

2. Add permission to Pi User to run Docker Commands

sudo usermod -aG docker pi

Reboot here or run the next commands with a sudo

3. Test Docker installation

docker run hello-world

4. IMPORTANT! Install proper dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y libffi-dev libssl-dev

sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip

sudo apt-get remove python-configparser

5. Install Docker Compose

sudo pip3 -v install docker-compose

Boom! 🔥 It's done!

Important Notice about Docker on the Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pis use the ARM architecture, and as a result, won't be compatible with all containers out of the box. Images will need to be built from an ARM base image. But, most of these images can easily be found on Docker Hub

Top comments (67)

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thedynomike profile image
TheDynomike

This works on

PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"

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cmrn profile image
Cameron

Thanks so much! Worked on Raspberry Pi 4

sudo apt-get -y install libffi-dev libssl-dev python3-dev python3 python3-pip
sudo pip3 -v install docker-compose
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After a fresh install, firmware and distro upgrade, docker-compose seemed to take quite a while to finish. Added the -v verbose flag to make sure the install wasn't stuck.

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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant

Ah, thanks, man! I am glad it worked!

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klo2k profile image
klo2k

On Ubuntu 20.04 raspberrypi, this also works:

apt install --yes python3-paramiko
pip3 install docker-compose
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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant

Ah, thanks! 👍🏽 🙂

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vegasbrianc profile image
Brian Christner

It seems a problem with the docker python client. After running docker-compose for the first time. You get the error ImportError: No module named ssl_match_hostname on init

The fix is cp -r /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/backports/ssl_match_hostname/ /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/backports

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dbrosy profile image
dbrosy

this might be a better option.

sudo apt-get remove python-configparser
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After removing configparser docker-compose starts as expected.
I removed after installing compose via pip but noted an error related to configparser at end of install so this might be better run after dependencies but before compose. This part I haven't tried

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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant • Edited

Hmm, this is weird did you try to install it with Python 3?

Python 2 support ends next year.

Update, in the next few weeks, I'll rewrite this and try again on a fresh installation that should help me find the errors.

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vegasbrianc profile image
Brian Christner

I was just using the standard installers as listed in your instructions (which are great BTW). Everything from first glance still uses Python2.

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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant

Yeah, you are correct, I just re-read my own post and yep everything seems to be using Python 3 😅

Please disregard my last comment.

I'll update the post and fix the remaining issues soon, that should help with my confusion.

Just out of curiosity how did you manage to fix the problem? By copying the dependency? I haven't seen this solution ever before.

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vegasbrianc profile image
Brian Christner

This is specific to ARM Docker deployments. The Ubuntu deployments in the Cloud don't seem to have this issue.

I found people having the similar issue after installing docker-compose - github.com/docker/docker-py/issues...

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fredc1 profile image
fred-c1 • Edited

Thanks.
Tested today.
Raspberry pi 3B+ with Raspbian Buster Lite

I had to switch to python3/pip3 to install docker compose.
The message just before the error was:
setuptools requires Python '>=3.5' but the running Python is 2.7.16

Solution:
1 = make python3 the default python => search google
2 = sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip "3" !!!
3 = sudo pip3 install docker-compose "3" !!!

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zuidwijk profile image
Marcel Zuidwijk  • Edited

Yep, got this error too and that indeed was the solution. The strange part is that it did worked, till about one or two weeks ago. Now I use this:

$ curl -sSL get.docker.com | sh
$ sudo usermod -aG docker pi
$ sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev
$ sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip
$ sudo apt-get remove python-configparser (apparently this isn't installed by using my commands on a clean install)
$ sudo pip3 install docker-compose

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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant

Updated the post to reflect this. Thanks!

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rhbroberg profile image
Rick Broberg

If you amend step 2 to include

newgrp docker

then you don't need to reboot or use 'sudo docker' while you're in that shell.

Also, if you amend step 4 to include '-y' in your 'apt-get install' lines it is more friendly to copy/paste. Everybody is going to answer 'y to the installation question anyway.

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wmbell65 profile image
William Bell • Edited

Hi everyone,
I am trying to duplicate this on a set of PI 2B (v1.1) and a Pi 3B. I am completely new to Docker and thought this would be a good way to get started. I am setting up the Pi 3B as the masternode and 8 PI 2Bs as nodes for a docker swarm. I am running all nodes with the latest Raspian OS freshly installed on SD cards. I am running into an issue with the very first step.. it looks like there is an error in the source script, so am looking to see if this can be broken apart.. Any suggestions would be helpful.

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wmbell65 profile image
William Bell

Hi everyone,
I managed to get things sort of sorted out:
1) I ran 'sudo apt-get remove docker*' on all nodes.
2) I then removed /etc/docker /var/lib/docker /etc/init.d/docker /run/docker on each node.
3) I ran 'sudo apt-get clean' on all nodes
4) rebooted all nodes

Starting from scratch I downloaded the get-docker.sh and copied it to each node and ran the following:
sudo sh get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker pi
sudo systemctl start docker.service
sudo systemctl enable docker.service
docker info
docker run hello-world

The next step was to run 'docker init swarm' on one of the nodes to create the manager node. This looks to have completed properly as I got 'swarm initialized....'

At this point, the responsiveness of the node fell through the floor.. top shows CPU 98% idle but keystrokes etc are delayed by 30-40 seconds. I am thinking maybe memory?? but am not sure what the next step would be after this...

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robertbernstein profile image
Robert Bernstein

Thank you, @william bell! That did the trick!

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robertbernstein profile image
Robert Bernstein

I may have spoken to soon. It finished running sudo sh get-docker.sh, which it hadn't before, but it still fails to start Docker Application Container Engine.

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wmbell65 profile image
William Bell

I switched over to Ubuntu and not only did Docker install, I got Kubernetes installed and working as well.. I had to try a couple of minor things, but mostly missing packages

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pachangadad profile image
Birger Luecht

Thanks for the outline of step by step commands. This worked for me also on RPI3

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wmbell65 profile image
William Bell

As an FYI.. the whole issue of the master node hanging went away when I switched from Raspberry Pi OS to Ubuntu 20 server.. I even managed to get kubernetes installed..
What made this interesting was that the master is a Pi 3b with an ARM7 V4 while the rest are Pi 2B+ with ARM7 v5..

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icloudphil profile image
Phil Chen

Tested on RetroPi 4, I was originally getting sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) right after installing docker using the curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh after a whole bunch of the google search, I landed. Just want to share the error I got was simply resolved by

  1. continue to follow those 5 simple steps
  2. skip docker run hello-world would give you error message about the access deny
  3. restart your raspberry pi 4
  4. come back and continue with the hello-world steps and the rest!
  5. it simply just worked!

Thanks Rohan for this awesome guide!

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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant

Ah, thanks man. I'll add a note to restart the device if you see any errors. It's people like you who help keep this guide updated!!

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andyraddatz profile image
Andy Raddatz

Thanks for this, but I also had to install libssl-dev before the final sudo pip install docker-compose worked

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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant

I'll update the post to include this as well! Thanks! 👍🏽

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rohansawant profile image
Rohan Sawant

Boom! It's done. Anything more? 😇

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bmitchinson profile image
Ben Mitchinson • Edited

Worked on first try as of March 2020 Rasp Buster Lite, thank you!

Also, the build step for bdist_wheel to run setup.py takes a pi 3 b+ like 12 minutes, so know that it's not broken if that's taking a while. CPU gets pretty hot, recommend rebooting and letting it cool for a while.