Patrick Domingues

In this tutorial you will be shown how to configure Ubuntu 20.04 to execute Docker without using sudo. By default, you have to run docker commands with sudo privilege or by a user in the docker group. This tutorial will show you how to bypass that.

To test your privileges to confirm you cannot run Docker without sudo type in docker run hello-word. You should get the following message and if should move forward with the tutorial.

$ docker run hello-world 
Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker 
daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.
sock: Get http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.27/containers/json: 
dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied

Lets Get Started

1. SSH into your Ubuntu 20.04 server.
2. Create new group. This command will likely fail as group maybe already exist, but let’s run it anyways.

sudo groupadd docker

3. Now we will add the current logged in user to the docker group

sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker

4. Lets restart the group shell by running the following command. A reboot would work as well.

newgrp docker

5. Now if your run the following command docker run hello-world  you should see a successful message instead of an error that you do not have permissions.

docker run hello-world

Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
ca4f61b1923c: Pull complete 
Digest: sha256:97ce6fa4b6cdc0790cda65fe7290b74cfebd9fa0c9b8c38e979330d547d22ce1
Status: Downloaded newer image for hello-world:latest

Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.

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Patrick Domingues

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