How to Setup Docker in FreeBSD

Right now, you can’t run docker natively on FreeBSD. I understand that there are arguably better alternatives to Docker in the FreeBSD universe like using jails, but it’s hard to adjust to this if you’re coming from Linux. Also, for many projects out here, Docker is the preferred containerisation method of use, so rest assured, alot of READMEs out here have instructions for a Docker set-up, not jails.

Some people would ask, why not build Docker from source? Well, that’s not possible for now because Docker uses some Linux Kernel features like namespaces and cgroups which are absent in FreeBSD. To make this work natively in FreeBSD, someone would have to work around this. This has been attempted before but the project has been stale for some time now. The only practical solution left is running Docker inside a Linux VM inside FreeBSD. In this post, we’ll be using docker-machine and virtualbox to do just that.

First, you need to install a docker-client, docker-machine and virtualbox by:

sudo pkg install docker docker-machine virtualbox-ose

After installing virtualbox, you need to load the vboxdrv kernel module by adding vboxdrv_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf. You should also add your current user to your vboxusers group in order to use vbox:

sudo pw groupmod vboxuser -m <username>

Once you are done, reboot your workstation in order to load the virtualbox kernel modules.

I decided to use docker-machine for setting up docker because it lets me easily create Docker hosts on my computer by creating servers, installing docker on them and configuring Docker client to talk to them [0] and it’s painless to use:

# Create the virtual box host
docker-machine create -d virtualbox default

# List all the hosts present:
docker-machine ls

Now you should set up your environment variables, so that your docker client can be able to use docker installed inside virtualbox:

eval "$(docker-machine env default)"

You can opt to stick that fella ^ in your .bashrc or .zshrc file. With that, you can run docker in FreeBSD :)

[0] https://github.com/docker/machine/