Setting up Docker for Qubes OS

2 minutes • 2024-10-05 | docker qubes-os 

I have always wanted to have a machine that is reasonably secure. I am not talking NSA level security here, but secure enough so that I do not have any headaches with viruses, malware etc. On top of that, I wanted to reduce the information that advertisers and marketing companies have on me.

Qubes-OS

The solution came with Qubes OS. I have been following the project for quite a while now and finally decided to give it a try. So far, very impressed and very satisfied with my system. Everything is isolated as it should and it is working as expected.

Docker

One thing that troubled me though was how I was going to install docker on my code VM. Since I do rely on docker and docker compose for many projects, I wanted to have that available for my code VM.

My initial attempts worked reasonable. I installed docker on my code VM, run my commands, and started coding as usual. However once my code VM restarted the changes were lost and that was a bummer.

I then went to install docker in the template that my code VM is based on (debian-12-xfce).

Success!

Everything worked perfectly fine and I am up and running.

Isolation

Well, it did work, but had a small side effect. When I decided to create a new VM to do some different coding, the docker environments from my code VM interfered with my new one.

I had to find a way where although docker in installed in the template, any children VMs would have their docker images in the /home folder, where we would have persistence but also isloation.

The solution was quite simple. All I had to do is open a terminal to my template VM (debian-12-xfce) and create the file /etc/docker/daemon.json with the following contents:

{
    "data-root": "/home/user/.docker-images",
    "group": "user"
}

With the above, any images in my code VM will be created under /home/user/.docker-images and reside there persistent.

NOTE: The reason for the group entry being user, is because we need to ensure that the user group owns docker’s sock file. If not, then we will not have permissions to access it and docker will not work.

I hope this helps.

  • Nikolaos Dimopoulos

    Boldly goes where no other coder has gone before.... and other ramblings

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