How to Configure Docker in Rootless Mode?

Question

How to configure Docker in rootless mode?

Environment

Container platform: Docker

Answer

For better security, we recommend that you always run Docker in rootless mode. For more information about how to configure Docker in rootless mode, see Docker documentation.

Using the xfs filesystem for /home ($HOME) is highly recommended.
A minimum of 50GB of free disk space for /home is recommended.
Before you enable Docker in rootless mode, make sure you stop the system-wide Docker service with the following command: sudo systemctl disable --now docker.service docker.service
The Docker rootless binaries will be available in the $HOME/bin folder.
Amazon Linux 2 does not support Docker in rootless mode. If you want to use Amazon Linux as your operating system, we recommend using the latest Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) x86_64 AMI.

Example steps using the docker supplied installation script (as the non-root user):

curl -fsSL "https://get.docker.com/rootless" | sh

The above commands should already have started the Docker service. If it has not started, do the following to enable and start it:

Run the following as the non-root user:

systemctl --user enable --now docker.service
systemctl --user start --now docker.service
systemctl --user status docker.service

Run the following command to allow services to run even after the user logs out:
```
sudo loginctl enable-linger <username>
```