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Docker Machine

Machine lets you create Docker hosts on your computer, on cloud providers, and inside your own data center. It automatically creates hosts, installs Docker on them, then configures the docker client to talk to them. A "machine" is the combination of a Docker host and a configured client.

Once you create one or more Docker hosts, Docker Machine supplies a number of commands for managing them. Using these commands you can

  • start, inspect, stop, and restart a host
  • upgrade the Docker client and daemon
  • configure a Docker client to talk to your host

Looking for the installation docs?

For Windows or Mac, you can obtain Docker Machine by installing the Docker Toolbox. To read instructions for installing Machine on Linux or for installing Machine alone without Docker Toolbox, see the Machine installation instructions.

Understand Docker Machine basic concepts

Docker Machine allows you to provision Docker on virtual machines that reside either on your local system or on a cloud provider. Docker Machine creates a host on a VM and you use the Docker Engine client as needed to build images and create containers on the host.

To create a virtual machine, you supply Docker Machine with the name of the driver you want use. The driver represents the virtual environment. For example, on a local Linux, Mac, or Windows system the driver is typically Oracle Virtual Box. For cloud providers, Docker Machine supports drivers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean and many more. The Docker Machine reference includes a complete list of the supported drivers.

Since Docker runs on Linux, each VM that Docker Machine provisions relies on a base operating system. For convenience, there are default base operating systems. For the Oracle Virtual Box driver, this base operating system is the boot2docker.iso. For drivers used to connect to cloud providers, the base operating system is Ubuntu 12.04+. You can change this default when you create a machine. The Docker Machine reference includes a complete list of the supported operating systems.

For each machine you create, the Docker host address is the IP address of the Linux VM. This address is assigned by the docker-machine create subcommand. You use the docker-machine ls command to list the machines you have created. The docker-machine ip <machine-name> command returns a specific host's IP address.

Before you can run a docker command on a machine, you configure your command-line to point to that machine. The docker-machine env <machine-name> subcommand outputs the configuration command you should use. When you run a container on the Docker host, the container's ports map to ports on the VM.

For a complete list of the docker-machine subcommands, see the Docker Machine subcommand reference.

Getting help

Docker Machine is still in its infancy and under active development. If you need help, would like to contribute, or simply want to talk about to the project with like-minded individuals, we have a number of open channels for communication.

For more information and resources, please visit our help page.

Where to go next