How to run Docker on Windows 10 Home edition
Last updated: May 02, 2023
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
Recently I have been watching a tutorial where, in order to follow it, one should have Docker running on his machine. So far, so good, but it turned out that the latest versions of Docker require Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise or Education. Which means, that if you are like me and have just Windows 10 Home edition on your personal laptop, then you cannot use Docker…or maybe you still can. Read below to find out how 📑
Reasoning
First, let's do a short resume on the situation. What do we want to achieve and what do we currently have?
We have Windows 10 OS Home edition on our machine and we would like to have Docker platform running on the same machine, so we are able to create docker images and run containers, so we can learn better and grow faster! The last one is a bit out of scope of this article, but one should start from somewhere, no? 😏.
Actions
After defining what we want, let's see how to achieve it. Here are the steps I followed. It worked for me, which makes me share it with you, so maybe I would save someone a few days of going back and forth to StackOverflow! 😐
After some reading, I found this article, which explains that it is possible to use Docker in Windows 10 Home by leveraging a Linux virtual machine and have docker containers running on it.
choco install docker-machine
This will create a docker virtual machine called 'default'.
This is to allow the Docker client and Docker Compose to communicate with the Docker Engine running in the Linux VM, that we named "default".
You may also need to run:
@FOR /f "tokens=*" %i IN ('"C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\docker-machine\bin\docker-machine.exe" env') DO @%i
, in order to get Docker working properly. The specified path in the above command may vary depending on your setup.
These will install everything you need to start using Docker on your Windows 10 Home OS.
Conclusion
Now that we have all we need ready to use, we may spend our time on actual learning, either by following a docker related tutorial or a book. No matter what you want to do next, you have all the tools you will need. I personally will try to finish the previously mentioned tutorial and then, who knows, may be I will start using Docker for each next project I do.
By the way, during the process of researching, I found a very promising book which is specifically about Docker. It's called "Docker in Practice" by Ian Miell. If this interests you, you might want to take a look.
🔥 Thanks for reading! 🔥