Setting up Docker for 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.

I hope this helps.