Docker and the horrible “one line installation” fad

One of the weird things that sane (or some would say “old skool”) system administrators complain about lately is that with the rising popularity of UN*X systems (mostly Mac OS X and Linux) in the world, and in particular in the software development world, people using UN*X system want less and less to understand how to manage their systems and the culmination is the

to install this complicated system level software, just copy and paste simple wget command to your terminal

with Docker being the most horrible example of that behavior. No sane person (who understand UN*X) will ever think that installing Docker by feeding the content of a URL to bash is a good idea, but for some reason this is the documented and recommended way by the Docker people. Other examples are abound, but lets concentrate on fixing the Docker scenario.

If you are on Ubuntu and want to install Docker sanely – i.e. to understand what is happening and how it affects your system, here are the simple instructions:

# trust the Docker key for software installation
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 36A1D7869245C8950F966E92D8576A8BA88D21E9
# add the docker repository to the software channels
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://get.docker.com/ubuntu docker main'
# update APT
sudo apt-get update
# install docker
sudo apt-get install lxc-docker
# recommended - give yourself permissions to run docker
sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker

See, that wasn’t really hard to understand, right?

If anyone wants to contribute such instructions for other operating systems, I’d be happy to publish it here.

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