Last week, my friend who is working on a microservice project at work suddenly messaged me saying that he realised Docker Desktop is no longer free.
Docker Desktop is basically an app that can be installed on our Windows machine to build and share containerised apps and microservices. It provides a straightforward GUI to manage our containers and images directly from our local machine.
Docker Desktop also includes a standalone Kubernetes server running locally within our Docker instance. It is thus very convenient for the developers to perform local testing easily using Docker Desktop.
Despite Docker Desktop remaining free for small businesses, personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects, it now requires a paid subscription for professional use in larger businesses. Consequently, my friend expressed a desire for me to suggest a fast and free alternative for development without relying on Docker Desktop.
INSTALL DOCKER ENGINE ON WSL
Before we continue, we need to understand that Docker Engine is the fundamental runtime that powers Docker containers, while Docker Desktop is a higher-level application that includes Docker Engine. Hence, Docker Engine can also be used independently without Docker Desktop on local machine.
Fortunately, Docker Engine is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Thus, we are allowed to use it in our commercial products for free.
In order to install Docker Engine on Windows without using Docker Desktop, we need to utilise the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to run it.
STEP 1: ENABLE WSL
We have to enable WSL from the Windows Features by checking the option “Windows Subsystem for Linux”, as shown in the screenshot below.
After that, we can press “OK” and wait for the operation to be completed. We will then be asked to restart our computer.
If we already have WSL installed earlier, we can update the built-in WSL to the Microsoft latest version of WSL using the “wsl –update” command in Command Prompt.
Later, if we want to shutdown WSL, we can run the command “wsl –shutdown”.
STEP 2: INSTALL LINUX DISTRIBUTION
After we restarted our machine, we can use the Microsoft Store app and look for the Linux distribution we want to use, for example Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as shown below.
We then can launch Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from our Start Menu. To find out the version of Linux you are using, you can run the command “wslfetch”, as shown below.
For the first timer, we need to set the Linux username and password.
STEP 3: INSTALL DOCKER
Firstly, we need to update the Ubuntu APT repository using the “sudo apt update” command.
After we see the message saying that we have successfully updated the apt repository, we can proceed to install Docker. Here, the “-y” option is used to grant the permission to install required packages automatically.
When Docker is installed, we need to make a new user group with the name “docker” by utilising the below-mentioned command.
Docker Engine acts as a client-server application with a server that has a long-running daemon process dockerd. dockerd is the command used to start the Docker daemon on Linux systems. The Docker daemon is a background process that manages the Docker environment and is responsible for creating, starting, stopping, and managing Docker containers.
Before we can build images using Docker, we need to use dockerd, as shown in the screenshot below.
STEP 4: USING DOCKER ON WSL
Now, we simply need to open another WSL terminal and execute docker commands, such as docker ps, docker build, etc.
With this, we can now push our image to Docker Hub from our local Windows machine.
CONFIGURE A LOCAL KUBERNETES
Now if we try to run the command line tool, kubectl, we will find out that the command is still not yet available.
We can use the following commands to install kubectl.
$ curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/`curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt`/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
$ chmod +x ./kubectl
$ sudo mv ./kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl
$ kubectl version --client
The following screenshot shows what we can see after running the commands above.
After we have kubectl, we need to make Kubernetes available on our local machine. To do so, we need to install minikube, a local Kubernetes. minikube can setup a local Kubernetes cluster on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
To install the latest minikube stable release on x86-64 Linux using binary download:
$ curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
$ sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikubeThe following is the results of running the installation of minicube. We also run the minicube by executing the command “minikube start”.
We can now run some basic kubectl commands, as shown below.
