page_title: Installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux page_description: Installation instructions for Docker on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. page_keywords: Docker, Docker documentation, requirements, linux, rhel, centos
Docker is available for RHEL on EPEL. These instructions should work for both RHEL and CentOS. They will likely work for other binary compatible EL6 distributions as well, but they haven't been tested.
Please note that this package is part of Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), a community effort to create and maintain additional packages for the RHEL distribution.
Also note that due to the current Docker limitations, Docker is able to run only on the 64 bit architecture.
You will need RHEL 6.5 or higher, with a RHEL 6 kernel version 2.6.32-431 or higher as this has specific kernel fixes to allow Docker to work.
Firstly, you need to install the EPEL repository. Please follow the EPEL installation instructions.
The docker-io package provides Docker on EPEL.
If you already have the (unrelated) docker package installed, it will conflict with docker-io. There's a bug report filed for it. To proceed with docker-io installation, please remove docker first.
Next, let's install the docker-io package which will install Docker on our host.
$ sudo yum -y install docker-io
To update the docker-io package
$ sudo yum -y update docker-io
Now that it‘s installed, let’s start the Docker daemon.
$ sudo service docker start
If we want Docker to start at boot, we should also:
$ sudo chkconfig docker on
Now let's verify that Docker is working.
$ sudo docker run -i -t fedora /bin/bash
Done!
Continue with the User Guide.
If you have any issues - please report them directly in the Red Hat Bugzilla for docker-io component.