Install Rootless Docker

Table of Contents

Overview

Rootless docker is the is the new function launched in docker version v19.03 which help to run docker without giving root permission.
Although there are podman by Redhat which provide this same functionality.
Let us see how to setup rootless docker.

Before Installation of rootless docker you should not have any version of docker installed in your computer.

To check run

Sudo docker --version

Step 1

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/rootless | sh

Fig: Installation of rootless docker

As during installation, I met with an error solve it by running this :-

sudo sh -eux <<EOF
# Install newuidmap & newgidmap binaries
apt-get install -y uidmap
EOF

Run step 1 again

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/rootless | sh

Now our rootless docker is ready to run.

But just wait I found another error when I restarted my computer error looks like this

So, I just started to do research and I found solution.

Add this to:-

 
~/.bashrc
export PATH=/usr/bin:$PATH
export DOCKER_HOST=unix:///run/user/1000/docker.sock

Now we are ready to run rootless docker

Fig: Rootless docker ran successfully

Fig: Command to check rootless docker running as rootfull or rootless (we can see all process is running rootless)

Limitations of rootless docker

Cgroups (including docker top, which depends on the cgroups) not supported
By default, exposing privileged TCP/UDP ports (< 1024) is forbidden (we are going to see how to allow that)

 sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=ep $HOME/bin/rootlesskit

Docker has huge community support.
Podman is still into nascent phase.
Docker has docker compose but it is not available in podman in future it might be available.
Podman is only available for Linux while docker is cross platform.
You might face some random error in podman.