Docker on Amazon AWS

April 27, 2014 · docker amazon aws centos

This is a short tutorial about getting Docker running on AWS Ubuntu. I’ve done this as I found that boot2docker was using a lot of memory and CPU on my laptop, and port forwarding is a pain. As I already have a free instance on Amazon AWS, I can use this.

(1) Get an Amazon EC2 instance and install Ubuntu on it.

I found it useful to put an alias into my ~/.ssh/config with all the keys etc set-up so I can connect just using ssh ec2.

(3) Install Docker

apt-get -y install docker.io

(4) Start Docker

By default, Docker is a daemon., but I want to use mine for development, but shut down when done.

service docker.io stop

I want to set-up port forwards. So I run a command to connect to the EC2 instance and start the daemon, so I run this from my local machine:

ssh -t -L8080:localhost:8080 -L4243:localhost:4243 ec2 sudo docker -d -D -H tcp://127.0.0.1:4243

This command does a few things:

Connects to your host and forwards ports 4243 (default Docker port) and port 8080 (where I run my apps). You may wish to forward other ports, e.g 3306 for MySQL. These are via an SSH tunnel, so it’s secure as well.
Starts Docker in debug mode so you can look at what it is up to.
Tells Docker to listen on port 4243.

When you’re done, ctrl+c to shut it down.

(5) Test

You probably want to perform some basic smoke tests. You’ll need to set-up an environment variable:

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://localhost:4243

Pull an image:

docker pull centos

Run a simple command:

docker run -t -i centos echo 'Hello world!'

Download from a repo:

docker run -t -i centos yum -y install ping