Docker & CentOS: docker-proxy is not in your PATH

I’m not a big fan of Docker, coming from a Unix background I don’t see the hype and I’m quite happy with FreeBSD jails, that as far as I know are really similar to the container thing** Docker is about.
Anyway, a few days ago I was fighting with a Docker installation on a CentOS server.
It turned out it was not so simple, and in fact installing Docker from the distro repositories is a very bad idea!
While dockering around, I came across a strange error about docker-proxy is not in your PATH. The reason is that CentOS does not install “plain” docker executables, rather something like docker-current and docker-proxy-current. Searching the web revealed that a simple symbolic link or a rename could fix the problem, and so it was. Or it seemed to be.
But while all the docker-stuff was working, I came again across the very same issue during a build.
At that point I decided to nuke the CentOS Docker packages and to install them the official way, so following the official Docker instructions for CentOS, I did:

$ sudo yum remove docker \
                  docker-client \
                  docker-client-latest \
                  docker-common \
                  docker-latest \
                  docker-latest-logrotate \
                  docker-logrotate \
                  docker-engine
                  
$ sudo yum install -y yum-utils

$ sudo yum-config-manager \
    --add-repo \
    https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
    
$ sudo yum install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io    

and the build was able to complete!

Lesson learned: when dealing with a tool that I don’t know well, on an operating system I’m not used too, it is better to follow the official installation instructions. Even if they are longer than a package manager install command!

The article Docker & CentOS: docker-proxy is not in your PATH has been posted by Luca Ferrari on May 28, 2020

Tags: docker , linux , centos