Control and configure Docker with systemd (Engine)

Control and configure Docker with systemd

Many Linux distributions use systemd to start the Docker daemon. This document shows a few examples of how to customize Docker’s settings.

Starting the Docker daemon

Once Docker is installed, you will need to start the Docker daemon.

$ sudo systemctl start docker
# or on older distributions, you may need to use
$ sudo service docker start

If you want Docker to start at boot, you should also:

$ sudo systemctl enable docker
# or on older distributions, you may need to use
$ sudo chkconfig docker on

Custom Docker daemon options

There are a number of ways to configure the daemon flags and environment variables for your Docker daemon.

The recommended way is to use a systemd drop-in file. These are local files in the /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d