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 

In this tutorial you will be shown how to use Docker commands and if you need help Executing docker without using sudo privilege click here.

In this section below I will explain how to use docker commands. So, before going into these details, let’s take look at the syntax of ‘docker’ commands:

$ docker [options] [sub-commands] [arguments]

Now if you want to list all available sub-commands of docker, run:

$ docker

There are many sub-commands and arguments that can follow after $docker. Below are some of them in the following sections of this tutorial.

Management Commands:

  attach      ## Attach local standard input, output, and error streams to a running container
  build       ## Build an image from a Dockerfile
  commit      ## Create a new image from a container's changes
  cp          ## Copy files/folders between a container and the local filesystem
  create      ## Create a new container
  diff        ## Inspect changes