Installing on Windows

The native Docker package can be run on 64-bit Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise. It uses the Windows 10 virtualization engine to virtualize the Linux kernel. This is the reason that the installation package does no longer contain the VirtualBox setup, as with the previous versions of Docker for Windows. The native application comes in a typical .msi installation package. If you run it, it will greet you with a friendly message, saying that it is going to live in your task bar tray, under the small whale icon, from now on:

The Docker's icon in the tray informs you about the Docker engine state. It also contains a small but useful context menu:

Let's explore the preferences settings and see what's available. The ?rst tab, General, allows you to set Docker to run automatically when you log in. If you use Docker daily that may be the recommended setting. You can also mark to check for updates automatically and send usage statistics. Sending usage statistics will help the Docker team improve the tool in future versions; unless you have some mission critical, secure work to be done, I recommend turning this option on. This is a great way to contribute to future versions of this magni?cent tool:

The second tab, Shared Drives, allows you to select the local Windows drives which will be available to the Docker containers you will be running:

We are going to cover Docker volumes in Chapter 2, Networking and Persistent Storage. Selecting a drive here means that you can map a directory from your local system and read that as a Windows host machine to your Docker container. The next preferences page, Advanced, allows us to make some restrictions on the Docker engine running on our Windows PC and also select the location of the virtual machine image with the Linux kernel:

The default values are usually good out of the box and unless you experience problems during the development process, I would recommend leaving them as they are. The Network lets you con?gure the way Docker works with the network, the same as subnet address and mask or DNS server. We are going to cover Docker networking in Chapter 2, Networking and Persistent Storage:

If you're behind a proxy in your network and would like Docker to access the Internet, you can set up the proxy settings in the Proxies tab:

The dialog is similar to what you ?nd in other applications where you can de?ne proxy settings. It can accept no proxy, system proxy settings, or manual settings (with a different proxy for HTPP and HTTPS communication). The next pane can be useful to configure the Docker daemon:

The Basic switch means that Docker uses the basic con?guration. You can switch it to Advanced and provide a customized setting in a form of JSON structure. The Experimental features are the same as we have already mentioned during the Docker setup on macOS, this will be Checkpoint & Restore or enabling Docker graph driver plugins, for example. You can also specify a list of remote registries. Docker will be pulling images from insecure registries using just plain HTTP instead of HTTPS.

Using the Reset options on the last pane lets you restart or reset Docker to its factory settings:

Be aware though, that resetting Docker to its initial settings will also remove all images and containers currently present on your machine.

The Open Kitematic... option, which is also present in the Docker tray icon context menu, is a quick shortcut to launch Kitematic. If you do it for the ?rst time and don't have Kitematic installed, Docker will ask if you would like to download it ?rst:

That's it for installing Docker for Windows. It's a pretty painless process. As a last step of the installation process, let's check if Docker can be run from the command prompt, because it's probably the way you will be launching it in the future. Execute the following command in the command prompt or in the PowerShell:

docker run milkyway/java-hello-world  

As you can see on the previous screenshot, we have a Hello World message coming from the Java application started as a Docker container.